I have noticed scattered reports of IRIS hardware and software failures. Given the fact that The IRIS is a new design and we are field testing it now; it may be helpful to both the our community and 3DRobotics if we establish a place to document unusual or unexplained problems with our IRIS ( "?IRISes... IRISis?).
Here is my first report:
I have a question: I have a new IRIS and I had some issues getting the Quad up and running. I started with fully charged batteries, and performed the pre-flight check. All was well. I saw the solid green LEDs and commanded the bird to arm....nothing....I repeated the procedure about 10 times connecting and disconnecting the battery. I received no error signals. Then on about the 10th try the IRIS armed. This suggest either a software issue or a hardware QA problem. Has anybody else experience these intermittent failures?
I think we need to keep 3DRobots informed of the field testing done on their product.
Since the IRIS does not have a QA inspection sticker on it, it is hard to gain any insight into the pre-shipment process. I would like to know if they shake test the IRIS before shipping...
Replies
You didn't inadvertently ARM the IRIS with the safety switch while it was on its back did you? The Tarot gimbal power wires are very fragile. We always add some hot glue around the wires were they are soldered to the gimbal board to add some rigidity. Have you powered the gimbal separately with another battery?
It is possible that while it was on its back it armed.
It did not make the I'm being armed tweet noise...
I have not tried the gimbal with an external battery, as I don't know what voltage battery it wants....
When I tried checking to see if the gimbal battery connector was directly connected to the main battery connector with an ohm meter, it was not directly connected, the power leads seems directly connected, but the ground leads did not. So maybe the whole issue is the gimbal had no ground.
I just got time to fly my IRIS for the first time about a week ago.
It flew just fine right out of the box....
I only flew it twice and thought I really need to get a gimbal for it....
So I ordered the tarrot gimbal from 3DR and installed it and my gopro...
I then went otu to fly it and the gimbal was dead, no lights, no activity at all no response to the tilt on the RC transmitter....
So I figure maybe its not getting power....
I disarm the quad, put it away and take it inside to debug later.... (I only had about 10 minues to play with it)
Tonight I figure I'll diagnose the gimbal
So I power it up on my work bench (its not armed) and see no activity at all from the gimbal...
So I flip the quad over on its back to carefully look at the gimbal to see if maybe there was a power switch or something....
I see no swithch so I get my voltmeter to measure the voltage to see if the gimbal is getting power... 20 seconds later when I look back at the IRIS the unit is smoking and the lights are all dead...
I flip it back over so I can access and and unplug the battery, now its dead with or without the gimbal...
Very disappointed, waited months and months to get my unit, I've played with it less than 15min and now its dead.
Clearly there are quality teething problems at 3DR I hope they can get it working....
Anyone have similar issues?
Paul
Fly it in a wide open area and left and sit at say 10 foot to get out of ground effect it will be much easier.
Wow: This is a very active group of enthusiast. I did not give all of the information in my short post because the problem apparently resolved ( hopefully permanently). To help with some of the details. First my experience is not unique. I started this thread because I saw several other IRIS owns reports similar problems. The only way to see if we have an intermittent bug is to log the failures.
I did not print out the log report. I have two quads from 3D Robotics (in addition to a phantom and I had the ELEV8) and I have the Mission Planner up and running ( on Windows , the Android equivalent is working and I am working on getting a Ubuntu version running). In my particular case,my transmitter settings were as set-forth in the user manual. My transmitter was calibrated and working per my pre-light test with the Mission Planner. My indicator lights were appropriate. Green with GPS or Blue without. I did not change my transmitter settings between disconnects. I tried the battery connect disconnect because I saw a trouble report describing a similar problem with an earlier IRIS (perhaps December 2013). They connected and disconnected several times and the system cleared. I have experience with complicated systems and pinning down errors without an expensive complicated system acceptance testing program is difficult ; hence capturing the field failures helps.
Would any-buddy here know if 3DRobtics performs burn in testing prior to shipping?
Just to smooth out some of the perceptions. I am an advocate of 3D Robotics. That is why a bought a second Quad from them. I think we need to support a US presence in this field. If we do not help our suppliers create and deliver a quality product all of our robots will be manufactured off shore.
There is a possibility that this reported problem was caused by User Error, but we track these problems and see if the problem is recurrent and related to: Hardware, Software , poor documentation or pilot/operator error.
Thank you for the trouble shooting pointers. I will take heed and track the data logs. I will also follow the Steve's recommendation regarding the ardupilot forum.
Thanks
JB3: Thanks for the pointer. It seems pictures are worth a thousand words.
Please install one of the GCS apps (Mission Planner on Windows or APM Planner on Mac) and connect to Iris. That will give you all the info you need about system status.
There are many reasons. They are easier to observe if you are connected via telemetry to a ground station. Some reasons are advertised by the lights and by audio tones. Others are not. Here are some examples:
- RC controller not in stabilize. This, you are not actually using the arm command, since that condition is required.
- pixhawk safety toggle not engaged.
- bad:
- GPS/compass health
- RC calibration
- select perimeters (out of range acro angles, for example)
- certain hardware conditions
There are more, and most of these are reported via telemetry and shown in the ground station.
Of course, you can fly headless, but you lose some visibility into the automatic checks (many of which you can turn off, if your operation does not rely on them, and you want to bypass these preflight checks; not recommended for most applications, but you might decide you "just want to fly")
Nothing in what you've deceived sounds like a bug. It sounds like the system is protecting you, you just don't yet know how to "lisyen" to what it's protecting you from. Some of these issues (especially GPS health) can be transient.... It might not have gotten a solid GPS lock..... And if it launches without, bad things can happen, as an example)
You have to arm in stabilize. Both switches in the up position.
There seems to be some confusion on this. I have armed in AltHold mode with green flashing LED indicating GPS lock.
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