Folding quadcopter crashed after 10 minutes (reward offered)

Hi,

It’s my first time here so please be gentle.

Here’s the background

I’ve just got a folding quadcopter which I’m taking with me on my round-the-world motorcycle trip. It’s running an APM 2.6 with 3.2.1 loaded on it and a 4s lipo.

I’ve been doing little trial runs with it in stalibilise mode but loiter and Alt hold were irratic. I enabled IMU logs and found I had high vibration so I zip tied all cables and remounted the APM and the vibrations reduced and loiter and ALT hold worked well…so I progressed onto using the FPV goggles…

All went well for about 10 minutes or so and then as I was just approaching the landing spot, it started going a bit nuts. From my fpv goggles I saw it start to loose altitude and “swirl” around a bit, then it dropped more and in panic I applied max throttle to try to give it some altitude to avoid the floor…I nearly made it but it was too late and hit the ground vertically doing 5mph but horizontally doing 15mph ish. It flipped and broke a prop. the gopro footage also showed some irratic swirling and then the decent and crash.

From the attached log I can see that the quad wanted to remain level, but the pitch and roll were going all over the place and it just couldn’t recover :frowning:

I’m currently on the road so my spare parts are limited, but if someone can spend some time to help me sort this out, then I’m willing to paypal some beer money to help pay them back for their analysis and help (I hope this isn’t against forum rules, if so then I’ll amend the post).

If there’s any other information I can give, then please let me know.

Dave

How are you powering the Pixhawk? Looking at this log what I noticed is that at the low end, the Pixhawk is only seeing 4.4 to 4.7v (at 4.4v it is my understanding that the Pixhawk can potentially shut down).

Also, you might enable some more parameters in your logging, specifically compass data. The swirling sounds like a compass issue.