First let me say that I will always be a "newbie". I've been flying my 3DR quad for about 6 months and just when I think I get it figured out and seemingly flying well something weird happens and it falls out of the sky. Today I did a simple flight to tweak a new brushless gimbal (I had one previous flight with the gimbal). I took off, went from stabilize to loiter and loitered for about a minute, went back to stabilize and flew a little further out, went back to loiter for another minute, went back to stabilize and then RTL using channel 7. The quad flew back at current altitude (25M), started its descent and then just tumbled out of the sky. I wasn't using telemetry and don't have a log file.
Prior to the flight I had lowered my land_speed from 50 to 39 cm/s as my landing descent on my last flight seemed a bit fast. Also, I noticed that my sonar was disabled and I enabled it.
I thought I would at least have a fantastic video, but either the crash damaged the file being written or I neglected to start the video....
Anyone have any thoughts? I realize this isn't much info.
Thanks for any help.
Replies
My intuition says "brown-out" on the APM caused by a faulty/failing battery. LiPo batteries don't last forever and they are very fickle. I've had batteries that appear to be working fine one day simply fail the following day. If you've been flying your quad for 6 months, have you replaced the batteries in that time? Were you using a new battery or an older one? When was the battery charged in relation to the flight?
Addtionally, were you running your new gimbal off the same battery, or a separate supply? The additional load of that gimbal would shorten your available flight time... so you may have simply stayed up too long.
Hi Jim,
I think I had the very same experience today... I've been flying this quad for months without any problems. I tested again the new Tarot 2T-D Today. Actually this was my second flight with this gimbal and GoPro Hero3 camera, the first flight was ok.
I use the same 3S 4000 mAh battery to feed both copter, gimbal and 5.8 GHz 100 mW Tx. The gimbal has the channel 6 used for tilt the camera; cannel 5 is used for switching across three modes (manual, Loiter and Auto). Well After few seconds of flight in manual mode, maybe moving channel 6 for tilting camera.. i don't remember exactly, The quad fall down like a piece of plastic! I am pretty sure the propellers just stopped to spin in mid air. I am very scared about this issue now, because I've always felt very comfortable flying with it and I hope I can regain my reliability feeling of my quad once I will understand and insulate the problem. I will give a closer look to my telemetry log file and I will update news, but I suspect some interference with the new gimbal to the APM board from the receiver...
Alberto