Logs only reach so far. End at 300m hight

ArduCopter Copter 3.1
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A rather funny story. I flipped the wrong switch and was waiting for my tricopter to come back to me while it was autotuning away and gaining a lot of height in the low clouds. Crash was inevitable and the crashing unidentified vehicle was picked up by the police resulting in an article in the newspaper and it even showed on local news on TV.

Now I’ve retrieved the “aircraft” at the police station and I am very happy no one was harmed.
Checking the logs they only show what happened until it was descending and was about 300m above ground. Any ideas as to why? And if there is any way I can retrieve more data? Of course it was not unarmed in a proper way.


I also noticed that at the same time it starts descending it also starts oscillating in all axis. Here is the log of that.

I was using sonar which is giving strange readings all the time between 1 and 9 meters even when the copter is far up in the air.

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Phil,
Glad it turned out ok.
So it looks like the vehicle was in stabilize mode the whole time and the throttle goes to zero while the vehicle is still at 550m. In stabilize mode with throttle at zero no more attitude control is done so the vehicle will normally tumble. My guess is your vehicle’s aerodynamics mean it stays relatively flag even while falling. lucky!

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[quote=“rmackay9”]Phil,
Glad it turned out ok.
So it looks like the vehicle was in stabilize mode the whole time and the throttle goes to zero while the vehicle is still at 550m. In stabilize mode with throttle at zero no more attitude control is done so the vehicle will normally tumble. My guess is your vehicle’s aerodynamics mean it stays relatively flag even while falling. lucky![/quote]
Thanx for the guess. You are absolutely right! I found the Thr finally in the logs. I remmember turning it down all the way as i thought it must have crashed already or flown far away from the transmitters range.
I also have min_mot_spin quite high so maybe thats why it went down so softly.
Any idea as to why the logs don’t reach all the way to the crash?
here are two prints from Thr and Baro