I've been testing my purple board through the USB and it works good enough to replace an ArduPilot Mega 1 on an EasyStar. Everything is connected and the power jumper is in so the ESC is supplying system power.
But, the APM2 will not start up on either ESC or UBEC power. Even wired in, it still boots on the USB power, as it has always done. The APM1 never had any problems with power on this plane and another APM1 always works on a T-28.
Has anyone seen this problem with ESC/UBEC power?
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I have recently developed a similar problem as well. At first the problem seemed to be that when I had the minimosd board connected the APM2 would hang on boot. Sometimes I would get one blue led, sometimes no leds. I would remove the minimosd and it would work. Lately the boot freeze has been happening more often, even without the minimosd attached. Usually if I power cycle 10-20 times it will boot.
After reading this thread I have tried removing the dataflash card. So far, every time I boot it without the dataflash in (minimosd or no minimosd) it boots fine. I put it back in, and it won't boot. I suspect my dataflash card because I have other problems with it: sometimes I will come home from a flight and find no telemetry has been collected.
I believe this has been found and solved. When using APM2, it will not start if there is any traffic on the telemetry channel. I had Mission Planner open and waiting for the startup info while applying power to APM2. This method consistently prevented APM2 from booting. I changed the procedure to have Mission Planner disconnected and the APM2 now boots normally when power is applied.