Quad attack

Hi,

The day before yesterday, the weather condition were ideal for testing the autotune as I updated the firmware to 3.1.1.

After the flight, back to my workshop, I left the quad  on a table behind me.

In order to see the new PID, I didn't switch off the radio. As I flew far from my PC, I relaunched the telemetry connection. In the middle of dowloading the settings, suddenly the motors ran at their maximum speed, the quad hit my shoulder, and fell to ground after beautiful notches on my back and my shoulder.

There are no serious injuries for me and for the drone (one foot stand and a propeller)

I don't understand  the reason  of such reaction, it was disarmed, battery in good condition and no battery failsafe. A bug? Maybe....

Now the 3.1.2 is inside ;)

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  • Hmm... all this has me handling my IRIS very gingerly indeed.. too many wires added internally to the many already in there,

    too many emitters too many possible antenna.

    I am thinking for reliability it may be time for the industry to abandon the use of analog ESC and move to I2C interfaced ESC or possibly CAN interfaced ESC.

    Mikrocopter seems to be employing I2C ESC with success and PIXHAWK just acquired the ability to talk to same. Any other suppliers of pure digital ESC that dont cost an arm and leg?

    or Open designs for same that can be run at @oshpark ?

                   hotel zulu lima

  • Hi jvmolo,

    I also suffered an attack like yours but in my case it was probably caused by a spike that somehow got through to the signal wires connected to the ESC while I was handling a wire connected to APM module, as @Randy suggested. You can see my case in the following post:

    http://diydrones.com/forum/topics/arducopter-motors-turn-on-while-d...

  • I had a strange motor activation which occurred under different circumstances, but also while the quad was supposed to be disarmed (right after initial battery connection in my case). I do have dataflash logs of my incident (included). I'm sorry to hear you got hit. I was lucky enough to only have the props nick my hand, which (7 months later) only bears a few faint scars. 

    2013-11-19 08-34 111 (Freak motor start).log

    • Surely had some stored waypoints and pulsastes the auto mode or you accidentally put the throttle and reverse mode

    • Reverse mode???

      I'd lean towards the ESCs getting confused about something as well. I highly doubt the APM just went all self aware and tried to terminate you.

    • Do not set the throttle reverse mode

    • No it's impossible.

      I came back from the maiden flight few . Nothing has been changed into the radio settings. The apm was disarmed.

    • no waypoints stored, it was a maiden flight for my new quad. The auto mode wasn't set up

  • Developer

    Without logs (tlogs for example should be on your computer) it's all guesswork but my guess is that the copter firmware is not directly involved (i.e. AC didn't send a signal requesting full power from the motors) but instead the APM rebooted for some reason (power issue perhaps?) and the ESCs misread the short blip that comes out on the output pins from the APM2 as it's rebooted as a pwm signal.

    Advice too little too late perhaps but the first thing i do after picking up by copter is disconnect the battery.  I never carry it around with the battery connected.

    • I agree with you, I guess a power issue due to the ubec too weak. I changed it for a stronger

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