Today we had a 23kg drone crash that flew perfectly 10 missions before this in varying conditions, high wind and low wind it was flying very well.
Of course other than the constant compass variance errors that come up when you use gps on CAN… anyway that’s not why this drone crashed.
You will also see in the log constant dropouts from the RC receiver because the dragon link is having issues… again not related to the crash that I can see.
It looks like an instant spike in vibes like a prop let go… but really I just can’t see it these props are so strong they are Hobbywing X8 29" props and motor combinations.
Any thoughts as to why this may have occured? battery voltage was good up until things went crazy.
Finally there was a chute installed, it did not deploy. Not sure why it did not but a signal was never sent to deploy the chute.
Despite a little lateral imbalance motors seems ok. The rc4 works harder because copter was flying diagonally. There are two distinct bumps at 861s and 863s then hell got loose.
This definitely looks like a mechanical failure causing heavy vibrations which thrown EKF into failsafe.
Parachute did not deployed because the difference between desired and actual roll/pitch never went above 30deg for as long as 1 sec. (condition for automatic chute release).
Thanks for the responses guys, seems the consensus is a prop failure… hard to believe that really… these props are massive and seem high quality (Hobbywing Xrotor pro X8)
The other possibility is a bird strike I guess… even harder to believe but there was a large number of very large crows in that area…
We will be purchasing a third party chute deployment from Fruity Chutes as this is a scenario that the chute should definitely have been deployed by Pixhawk IMHO
@Eosbandi so more investigation and it seems that one of the arms the bolts may have come loose holding the folding arm mechanism. There are all missing and there is no damage on that arm… also that motor and arm are MIA… sooooo… mechanical failure… we do modify this frame to make it safer but this was one area neglected so we will be loc-tighting those bolts and expoxying the arms into the sleeves… I think it’s case closed other than IMHO the chut should have gone off so we will be buying a chute release system from fruity chutes and testing soon.