Well... My Solo crashed, HARD.
Solo will have to go back to the factory. Lost complete battery power at 0% at altitude and Solo flipped upside down and came spiraling down and landed legs up in a grass parking lot just behind a friends pickup truck.
Impact ejected the GoPro and landed about 30 feet away, GoPro also almost ejected SD card from the impact but was able to recover flight video, which stopped when the battery hit 0%. So, don't count on internal GoPro battery to continue video once flight battery hits 0%. Hope 3DR can fix that so it will switch over to GoPro battery to record the rest of the video.
Battery and GPS cover ejected along with two of the LED light covers. All 4 propellers destroyed.
Damage summary: Solo GPS will not work even after inspection, why I have no idea, Internal Gimbal HDMI connector ripped off. And to boot, for some reason the Controller now has a white/blank display with no data showing on it. I hope to be able to recover log files prior to shipment to 3DR.
Number 2 flight battery is shot = never run a LiPo battery pack to <10% capacity. Why that would happen, I have no idea.
So time to say goodbye to Solo as I send it back for repair. NEVER fly your battery lower than 25%, land it NOW, period!
I take the blame for being a stupid, lesson learned. Just glad no one or vehicle got hit. This is a real bummer....
Replies
UPDATE:
If you look at the followup on another forum, battery loss was determined by Controller/link failure. The battery was at 60% then the Controller display back-light turned orange and the displayed data froze. Also, on the tablet the telemetry data fields went what I can describe as garbled although receiving telemetry from Solo. I immediately hit Home and Solo did not respond right away, so I held down the Fly button to Land Now. We are not sure just what happened, but Solo appeared to perform a auto return Home to the vertical home point and by that time the battery level just dropped, I had no control - even tried Manual to no avail.
After powering off Controller and hooking it up to the charger all I got was blank/white display - no battery charge indicator. Pulled Controller battery, same thing. After I got home I pulled the Controller battery overnight and re-connected battery, now it's LCD flickered some data then came up. Controller still does not accept a full charge nor communicates with Solo even after a reset. 3DR is going to inspect the Controller. I'm sure that was the issue as I've read about Controller failures elsewhere.
Cheers
so because its your fault and you didnt pay attention to the battery level.. your going to send it back to 3dr and request them fix it for free? see this is why you dont buy products that are open source build your own so you dont have to rely on a company to give you a frame etc... when you crash all you do is replace an arm or prop or frame.. with these dji products and new 3dr which 3dr is going closed source proof by the proprietary batteries and frame etc... and it sucks..... this is why i stick with open sourced all the time
I always land at minimum 25% battery, or close to it.
I'd build my own UAS in the future, but have my hands full with a robot I'm working on.
Speaking of open source - I run Linux/Ubuntu on my desktop system.
Cheers
I wish there was a way to incorporate a low battery alarm device in the SOLO. So that way, even if you hit a certain voltage, you would still have a chance of returning it to base safely.
Doesn't Solo have automatic RTL on low battery? Did you disable that?
Of course Solo will auto-land I believe at 10% no matter where Solo is located. My issue was Solo was too far away and to high in ALT when the battery went to 0%, so it was free-fall time.
25 TO 30% is a good time to head back. I almost had the same thing happen to me. Logic shows windy days will suck that last 30% in no time. The calm days are more predicable. Hope you get your SOLO back soon.