I’m using pixhawk cube orange plus and I was testing my hexacopter. The stabilize and altitude hold mode works well. But in loiter mode around 7:42 of boot time, the drone just barely took off ground and started to tilt quite a lot. The mode was changed to land and then to stabilize to take control. Another attempt was made in loiter mode at around 8:20.6 of boot time, the motors reduced it speed although the rc input was the same. I’m not sure what is going wrong, any help is appreciated to fix this.
Thanks for the welcome. No, I have no battery voltage monitor configured, however I measured the charge after the flight, it was 46.8V. I’m using 12s battery. Also, after the power loss, I tried flying in stabilize and altitude hold mode, that worked.
As your battery was likely dying increasing throttle output and subsequent motor output was required until all was at max. So of course you need battery monitoring.
For the third time, yes a correctly connected and correctly configured voltage monitor and voltage failsafes would have fully avoided those unnecessary near crashes.
Just think about this for a second: can the copter operate correctly with an empty battery? How can the software know if the battery is empty?
This is like asking if the car stopped running because it didn’t have a fuel gauge. Of course it didn’t stop running because it lacked a fuel gauge. It stopped running because it was out of fuel and the driver had no clue…
The pilot had no clue that the batt was empty and the flight controller could not dynamically set the PID gains because it also had no clue about battery voltage.
I tried running it again in stabilize mode with battery monitor setup. The drone started. It has a 6:1 thrust to weight ratio (without payload). And while landing, it just rolled itself. It’s the first few flight, so I’m not sure what went wrong or what to change in the PID. I have the video and log here: 1.1.26 - Google Drive
Are you sure the log you posted is from the event in the video? Because that log abruptly ends before any attitude change or ground strike.
Why no current logging?
I rechecked and re uploaded the log. The battery got disconnected from the pixhawk after the crash. The pixhawk was tore apart from its casing. Current monitoring is disabled as the power module I got supports 6s and upto 30A amps and no other peripheral is being powered by it. The motors each take 47A(max), exceeding the limit of the power module.
The craft was at a level attitude (~3 deg pitch or roll) when it stopped logging. Looks to me like the Flight Controller lost power when it touched down. The Roll and prop strike was not logged.
It looks like that to me too. But another thing is that I’m using the Hobbywing X6 plus motors. So according to the manual, if the motor receives no esc signal input, it would auto disarm after 0.25 secs and the lights would blink. But in the video, I can’t see the motors stopping or the motor led blinking.
Yes they do have CAN versions. Planning to integrate them in the future. Also, yes conducted the drone flight again today and it worked great in all mode. Seems like the pixhawk must have got disconnected midflight, which I can’t really figure out why. I changed the power connectors today just to be sure and it worked. Thank you both for helping out.
