Atown, Ive had my quad flip after a few minutes flying due to overheating.have you felt to see if your motors are heating up?

Thanks for the quick reply Mark.

Regarding the ESC's, I bought the quad RTF and test flown by Whitespy. And he actually flew it... it has a bit of dirt on the landing pads..
So I dont have the programming card and would assume he already programmed those things in. I did calibrate them, one at a time, as I had seen that as a fairly frequent problem with drifting or limited yaw control before the first flight.

My connections are not soldered. One of the bug selling points for me was the ability to easily upgrade components so I would prefer to not solder when possible. However, this was actually my next step to try and figure out what went wrong. My gut tells me its not the board or a configuration problem because its fine for a few minutes...then flips...then flys again. The board is just running doing math, if it does it right the first cycle, it wont make mistakes after that unless something tells it to change.

The board connections are solid. I actually placed a zip-tie on the cable to hold the cable with pressure towards the plug. Im at work at the moment so I cant remember the exact model of the board, but its the newer one with the 90 degree plugs for the reciever on the back of the board. Its highly unlikely they vibrated loose.

My props are balanced to perfection...something im anal about. The motors do have a bit of vibration in them but nothing too bad. I also thought that perhaps the vibration was building to some sort of crazy harmonic that is causing the one of the gyro to "gimble lock" (something Ive seen on multy prop aircraft). But the RPM's on a quad change speed so frequently, I dont see this as realistic.

Thanks again for your response. Beasue Im not in a place where I can send anything outside the country and regretfully I have no more props to burn thru, Im grounded until the new set arrives later this week. Anyone know if a place to pick up props in bulk in the US. I have no problem ordering a dozen pushers and a dozen regular, but 8 bucks for 3 props is a bit pricey because I have to add about 60% for international currier and import duties.

thansk

Matt

Originally Posted by Cervanchez

Atown, Ive had my quad flip after a few minutes flying due to overheating.have you felt to see if your motors are heating up?

They would get warm, but not too hot. Im not doing anything too aggressive, just hovering around.

Originally Posted by Atown93

I hava a question for the group... I am new tothe quad comunity and have to admit I have the quad bug in a big way. I have more years than I would like to admit in everything RC and until about 5 months ago I was unaware that quads even existed. I did a bit of research online about what direction to go in and settled on the whitepsy quad (ebay version) with the multiwii board.

It arrived about 3 weeks ago and with some small adjustments, calibration and balancing the props, was in the air in a few days just as advertised. Im a very patient and thoughtful RC builder. Anyone at the track for airfield will tell you that anything I own RC is always perfect. I am a huge "set-up" guy. I win races because my car is set-up better than anyone else on the track, not because its the newest or fastest. I chose the multiwii becasue I can set things up my way and make it my own.

Enough about that, here is the problem(s) Im having. After about 15-20 flights, tradegy struck last saturday. I was about 3 minutes in to my 2nd batery, auto level and head-free modes on, working on training myslef to go FPV and slowly hovering around some of the small bushes in my back yard while keeping the nose pionted at them. All of the sudden the quad flips over and is on the ground upside down. Lucky for me it landed flat and on some soft grass so no damage. My first thought was that perhaps I lost mag or acc calibration so I went back inside, and recalibrated with the GUI and evrything looked OK. Scraching my head and crossing my fingers I checked the balance on the props and put another battery in. Everything was working fine for another 3 min or so and this time I was about 10 feet off the ground when it happened again. This time bending one prop and snapping another in two.

I have read of cases where people loose power all together and their quad drops like a rock becasue of LiPo fialure or bad connections, but nothing with flipping after flying normally for a few minutes. When they flip, its usually right at take-off because of ECS calibration or something, not after several minutes of flight.

I removed the props and spun all the motors up to see if somehow one was behaving differently than others and they all seem to be working fine.

The other part of my problem is that I dont live in the US any longer, Props are impossible to purchase in the country where I live to I have to buy them from Ebay and wait 2+ weeks for them to arrive. There is no local source for me to go to for advise as myself and one other person in the country have quads.

I spent this last weekend going thru countless forums thrying to find something that resembles my case and cant seem to find anything....of course most forums are thousands of entries long and most of it is fluff or people who are guessing rather than advising.

Any help you could give would be greatly appreciated.

Matt

Yo, matt.
Do you have skype over there?

There was an issue with rev 1E boards and the crystal (soldering problem). What's the date on your board?

Originally Posted by Cervanchez

Update on my loss of power problem:
Before sending in my board I wanted to try a couple more things. I did verify that my loss of power is happening on all batteries. Sometimes I can recover before I hit the ground, but other times I just don't have enough lift at full throttle. And it is truly intermittent. It can happen anytime no matter what the pack voltage is, and I can fly it after it happens. I am going to re-program and re-calibrate my ESC's just to make sure that not it (recently, when calibrating, I was noticing I got more beeps from the ESC's if I left the throttle at max for longer, which I think could have changed the programming settings, not sure because I don't have any documentation on them). If that doesn't do it, I'll have to send it in to the Guru for a diagnostic. Just thought I'd post this to see if anybody had any other ideas before I'm grounded for a couple weeks.

Originally Posted by jpsabo

There was an issue with rev 1E boards and the crystal (soldering problem). What's the date on your board?

He is right!
There is an issue with one some of you having a crappy crystal.
He is trying to figure out when the started being laid on the boards.

Maybe we hcan help, by posting the dates of the boards that are having issues.
He said he will change out any rev 1E board with a that style chip.

Originally Posted by DoctorAudio

Yo, matt.
Do you have skype over there?

Yes, I do at home. Im at work at the moment.....

Working hard at hardly working.....!!!!!

Originally Posted by Atown93

Yes, I do at home. Im at work at the moment.....

Working hard at hardly working.....!!!!!

You have a pm!

Originally Posted by jpsabo

There was an issue with rev 1E boards and the crystal (soldering problem). What's the date on your board?

It's a rev 1D, dunno the date, is that printed on there as well? At work now so can't check

The date and serial number should be on the paper packed with the board.

Originally Posted by jpsabo

The date and serial number should be on the paper packed with the board.

All boards with May-June production dates, may have the suspect crystal.
I just got off the phone with the Guru asking him what he wanted to do about this.

First he would like to see those board, sent back for a crystal replacement.
After that any Rev 1E board can be sent back for a crystal replacement.
There may be up to a 50 in that May_June Production date.
But he has promised that any of the Rev 1E boards can be sent back.
Dude that is pretty cool.

I know I will be getting more of these boards, what a guy.
Much respect Guru.

Ill have to check when I get home

The date on mine was 04-2012 and I got it from witespy, who quickly swapped it out. The replacement board is dated 03-2012 I believe, and has had no problems (just updated it to MultiWii 2.1, too).

Originally Posted by DoctorAudio

All boards with May-June production dates, may have the suspect crystal.
I just got off the phone with the Guru asking him what he wanted to do about this.

First he would like to see those board, sent back for a crystal replacement.
After that any Rev 1E board can be sent back for a crystal replacement.
There may be up to a 50 in that May_June Production date.
But he has promised that any of the Rev 1E boards can be sent back.
Dude that is pretty cool.

I know I will be getting more of these boards, what a guy.
Much respect Guru.

Awesome.

decided to have some fun with my micro after work today what ya guys think

micro flip (1 min 3 sec)