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Pixhawk lockup and plane crash

Posted by Carlos Diaz on November 20, 2014 at 8:42am

Hello everyone,
I'm new on the forum, and in the autopilot world as well. I need some help to understand what happened with my plane.
I was flying in FBWA mode tuning the PID as described in the manual.
Suddenly, the motor stopped, the plane got unresponsive and crash on the land.
When we found the plane, luckly the battery was still plugged. Here are some thing we were able to see:
1- The multi color led was Green, even with the radio turned off.
2- Turning on the radio, there was not servo response
3- There was no telemetry signal. The RDF900 only has a Green light (no red flashing light)
4- The radio Rx was working fine, we plugged a servo on it and worked fine.
5- The orange B/E led was blinking.
After recycling power, it all seems to work well.
The setup was:
Plane: Canary 40 ARF
Motor: EVO 10GX gas
Radio: Spektrum DX6 with Thomas Scherrer LRS
Pixhawk Autopilot with latest firmware at the time (Nov, 15th)
Mission Planner 1.3.10 build 1.1.5369.11976
I have read that noise in the I2C bus can lockup the Pixhawk. I have extended the wires for the airspeed sensor as well as the wires for the power supply.

Any suggestion on how to avoid this Pixhawk lockup in the future will be usefull.

Thanks!
Cheers,
Carlos

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Tags: crash, fail, failure, lockup, pixhawk, problem
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Replies

          • Developer
            Andrew Tridgell > Andre K. November 26, 2014 at 12:27pm

            unfortunately we don't log I2C errors on Pixhawk - the errors are hidden in the NuttX layer. That can be fixed, and I have it as a todo item for 3.2.1, but the zero value for I2Cerr error right now doesn't actually mean anything

            • Andre K. > Andrew Tridgell November 26, 2014 at 12:59pm

              oops ! - thank you for telling us that,   :)

  • Admin
    Thomas J Coyle III November 25, 2014 at 12:24pm

    @Carlos,

    Have you installed the zener diode on the Pixhawk servo output power bus?

    "When powering Pixhawk off the servo rail, we recommend adding a Zener diode (part number 1N5339) to condition the power across the rail and prevent it from becoming too high. This method (with Zener diode) can also be used as backup power for Pixhawk when using a power module, so in the case of a failure on the power module, Pixhawk will take power from the output rail. See the voltage ratings below for more information on powering Pixhawk. Note: The Zener diode should not be used with servos with more than 5V.Digital servos can feed up to 11v into the servo rail when powered off an external 5.1v bec.Pixhawk does not supply power to the servo rail."

    Regards,

    TCIII AVD

  • Federico Lanzi November 25, 2014 at 11:59am

    Guys,

    Any thought on this?

    I have experienced a similar issue, and many doubts about reliability come to me mind.

     

    has anyone suffered a lockup like this?

     

    thanks

    Rgds. 

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