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25% discount storewide with code " STRAYA25".

Enjoy the long weekend to all the Aussies.

I just had a crash with my Apex for an unknown reason. Here's a short video clip. It just spun out of control a few minutes into flight.

Apex Crash clip (0 min 19 sec)

There's a few messaes on the OSD that I've never seen before. If anyone knows what they mean, that might help me figure out what went wrong. Also, has anyone used the Runcam Swift 2 Steele edition? I am seriously hating the picture from that cam - massive halos around everything, and very unnatural colors, and wondering if someone has fiddled with setting to get a more reasonable picture.

Sadly, this is only the 4th flight on the frame. The first couple of flights were good, then the 3rd flight was super short, as something happened to the camera making it look like it was a negative image. The vendor replaced the cam without question (Thank you RDQ). This was the first flight with the new camera.

Update: I just watched the GoPro footage, and post crash you can hear 2 beeps per second, which sounds like lost coms between FC and ESC. Not quite sure what happened. Everything was still plugged in, and without fiddling with any of the connections I was able to power up on the bench and get the motors to spin up.

Bad luck man. So frustrating when you can't trust the gears and have to trouble shoot instead of just enjoy flying.

I use BF/Dji so I am not familiar with KISS gear/OSD messages.

But I had slowed down the frame and screen captured these OSD messages which appeared just before it crashed.

"OSD rescue mode , No connection to FC -4 ".

Lost connection between the OSD/FC due to loss of power between FC/ESC perhaps ?


As for the FPV camera, not a fan Runcam Swift 2 , Steele Edition or not. It looks a bit muddy and always has a colour cast ( warm purplish tinge) compared to other new cameras on the market.

sound to me like a loos connector .. where you power the FC with ... i would check that connector if there is any dirt in it... or if it isn't pressed in all the way

Thanks for the feedback guys. Some additional intel. After reviewing the GoPro footage, you can clearly hear 2 beeps/second from the ESCs, which means lost coms from the FC to the ESC. Now I'm guessing that it was something like a bad connector or a FC reboot. The connectors were all still connected after the crash though, and when I got home I powered up on the bench, and everything worked fine. All motors spun up and responded without issue. So now I'm thinking that the FC restarted, but I've never had that happen before, and I have thousands of flights on Kiss hardware, and maybe 6 or 8 Kiss builds. Almost all the other builds use individual ESCs rather than the 4-in-1. I do have a few other 4-in-1 builds, and they have worked fine, but I don't have so many flights on those. I do have the FETs facing the Fc on this build, as Steele does. Not sure if that can be problematic. It was at high throttle that this occured, but there are many other higher current parts of the flight that didn't cause grief.

I have very similar issue. Sometimes, motor1 wont spin. Sometimes beeps mid flight and crash.

If I shake the quad, sometimes restarts. Its the ribbon cable to the FC.

Thanks for the feedback. In my case the FC also quit communicating with the OSD board at the same time, which means that both of the plugs into the FC would have to fail simultaneously. While not impossible, an FC reboot seems more likely.

Just finished my Apex build with Caddx Vista (using HD camera plates on regular frame). Boy am I disappointed that the props are in view.

The Alien's geometry was such that the props were out of view. For some reason they gave that up.

Now with HD its even worse because the rapid moving props in the frame mess with the compression algorithm. I believe it causes DJI's focus mode to become more active than it otherwise would be.

There are tons of videos that would have shown you the apex has props in view.

Focus mode sucks anyways. I only run HQ mode with focus off.

Hah. You should try it with 6" props...

I'm surprised that nobody has made a TPU camera pod to allow mounting the DJI camera where a gopro would sit, for people who don't use one and just want to fly HD, and/or use the air unit to record.

The problem used to be simpler to solve; most people used narrower field of view lenses on the Aliens back in the day, and the cameras were larger and poked out more. I hate props in view too but what can you do...

Originally Posted by Strepto42

Hah. You should try it with 6" props...

I'm surprised that nobody has made a TPU camera pod to allow mounting the DJI camera where a gopro would sit, for people who don't use one and just want to fly HD, and/or use the air unit to record.

The problem used to be simpler to solve; most people used narrower field of view lenses on the Aliens back in the day, and the cameras were larger and poked out more. I hate props in view too but what can you do...

In this case it's not the lens. They changed the geometry of the frame. On the Alien the center line of the motors was basically in line with the standoffs. On the Apex, the motor center line is at least a 1/4" ahead of the standoffs.

I have a run a variety of lenses and cameras on my 5" Aliens and have never had the props in view.

I rebuilt my Apex, and was super cautious on the first flight. Oddly, it was reporting a super weak FrSky link, frequently down around 30dB at maybe 100m of clear LOS. The transmitter never complained about poor RSSI, and I looked at lowest RSSI on the transmitter at the end of the flight, and it was pretty normal. I swapped out batteries, and the next flight, around trees, showed a much better FrSky link in the OSD, up around 60dB, but a minute into the flight I started to get the OSD lost ink to the FC message again. Fearing that the FC would quit talking to the ESCs I landed immediately. I have a spare wire harness for the Apex/Kiss system. Guess I'll swap that out. I'm also using newer FW on the Kiss V2 and ESC, so I'm tempted to roll that back to what I have in all my Aliens.

Has anyone seen coms issues with the Kiss V2 on newer FW?

May be try the Kiss /Impulserc flyer FB group.
More likely to get your answers there.

Originally Posted by jasperfpv

May be try the Kiss /Impulserc flyer FB group.
More likely to get your answers there.

Not really a FB person. Sad to see people migrating there.

None of us are, but forums are kinda dead too, sadly. The Impulse guys generally don't check here any more, but they are quite active over there in the dedicated group.

Sad but it's reality...