Auto landing

Joined
Mar 10, 2016
Messages
93
Reaction score
27
Location
North central Illinois
I just had a new experience with my P3P. I haven't flown in over a week due to weather and commitments. I'm headed to Colorado next week and wanted to make sure everything is working. When I turned on the quad I noticed the battery was down about a light and a half. I know they start to discharge after about a week of no use. Since I was flying from my farm, and wasn't going to go too far from the take off point, I didn't worry about it. I got about a quarter of a mile out, over a soybean field and the friendly controller lady announced that the quad was landing. It still showed around 10 minutes of battery left. I touched the x in the red circle on the screen, with no results. By now it was at about 20 feet. As a last resort, I pushed the right stick forward and luckily it responded. I made it to a grass area along a trail I keep mowed in a natural area. I found it without too much trouble. It still had two solid lights on the battery. I took it back to the yard, and tried it again. I went to max altitude above the take off point and it flew until the battery was low enough to Go Home. I canceled that and landed it. So I tried the next battery. It was about one and a half lights down also. It did the same thing after a couple of minutes of hovering over the take off point. I let it land on the driveway, rebooted the battery, and again it flew until the battery was to the Go Home point. I assume this is the reason that it's recommended to always start out with a full battery. Glad I tried it at home and not in the middle of some Colorado Rocky Mountain High.
 
If you view your flight logs, they will probably explain what happened.
 
On the first one it gave me a "Critically Low Voltage Aircraft will land" message at 01:00 after take off. It was about 1200 ft from me at 80 ft altitude when I got that message. It still had over 07:30 minutes of battery left and landed 01:42 minutes after take off.
The second one gave me the low voltage landing warning at 00:57. It had flown 562 feet and was at 147 ft altitude, and had 08:43 left on the battery. It auto landed at 01:37.
When I started over with those batteries, I got around 8 minutes more flight time on the first one and around 9 minutes more on the second one, until they went into the return home mode.
I'll have to try the fully charged batteries to see what happens. I won't go too far away for the first minute though.
 
Please post your flight logs here so we can review them.
 
You can find instructions for retrieving your TXT flight logs here. Please attach the TXT files here. For the DAT flight logs, you can find instructions here. If the files are too large to attach here, you can upload them to a site like Dropbox.com and post a download link back here.
 
Looks like a sudden drop with the batteries volt/amps. Curious to see what happened.
 
That's interesting, I'll be glad to see what the issue was... Also when you said your farm and a soybean field goty attention too as my husband and I also farm ,and just starting soybean harvest
 
  • Like
Reactions: davidzimagery
You can find instructions for retrieving your TXT flight logs here. Please attach the TXT files here. For the DAT flight logs, you can find instructions here. If the files are too large to attach here, you can upload them to a site like Dropbox.com and post a download link back here.
Thanks for the info! I'm out of time tonight. I'll give it a try as soon as I have more time.
 
This really is not exactly related to the issue in this thread, but would it be beneficial to the battery to perform the procedure I will explain below every once in a while when the battery has discharged itself while in storage.

Put the partially discharged battery in the Phantom and after Home Point Set, take off and hover in place just above the ground until it reaches critical low point and let it land itself. Then after cooling, recharge the battery to full strength before using.

I don't know if this procedure would help discharge the battery and put it through a "full cycle". Anyone know if this would be something I need to do?
 
By tricking remaining display amounts they have created a battery with a smaller useful capacity range. Launching with a fully charged battery is to help keep the volts from reaching the lower limits so soon.
 
I would never have sent it up with the batteries at that level if I was flying anywhere but around my property. It still would have been a bad situation if it had gone down in the bean field, with only about 30 minutes of daylight left. It would be like trying to walk through knee high, 1/4 inch thick spider webs.
As far as posting the logs, I just got home. Don't know when I'll have time to figure out this posting log process. This site won't accept the HTM files that I managed to download, so I've got to try again.
 
HTM files wont do anyone any good here. What msinger took the time to mention is exactly what is needed, and what process everyone uses unless they want to spent a lot time and money sending it some place that tells you a story thinking you need to spend money with them.

Btw, I will try and look at them as well for you.
 
I got something to load, but not sure if these will work.
 

Attachments

  • DJIFlightRecord_2016-09-28_[18-11-03].txt
    116.3 KB · Views: 274
  • DJIFlightRecord_2016-09-28_[18-21-19].txt
    487.4 KB · Views: 270
  • DJIFlightRecord_2016-09-28_[18-30-00].txt
    115.4 KB · Views: 289
  • DJIFlightRecord_2016-09-28_[18-31-44].txt
    581.4 KB · Views: 263
For some reason I can't get it to work like he said. But then I always have to struggle when embarking upon computer related stuff that I haven't dealt with before. Part of the problem is that I'm trying to figure it out in small, interrupted time frames. Darned work and social plans just get in the way.
 
I got something to load, but not sure if these will work.
Those don't seem to work either.
For some reason I can't get it to work like he said. But then I always have to struggle when embarking upon computer related stuff that I haven't dealt with before. Part of the problem is that I'm trying to figure it out in small, interrupted time frames. Darned work and social plans just get in the way.
I can't get anything from the device when I connect to my computer with a USB cord. So I tried to do it on the tablet I use with the quad. When I hit upload, that screen goes away and I have no idea where the upload went. So I shared the logs to my gmail, and the 4 attachments I posted earlier were the result. They just produce jiberish. I must be missing a critical step somewhere in the process. I'll start over when I have more time to work through it. I'm determined to figure this out now.
 
Those don't seem to work either.

I can't get anything from the device when I connect to my computer with a USB cord. So I tried to do it on the tablet I use with the quad. When I hit upload, that screen goes away and I have no idea where the upload went. So I shared the logs to my gmail, and the 4 attachments I posted earlier were the result. They just produce jiberish. I must be missing a critical step somewhere in the process. I'll start over when I have more time to work through it. I'm determined to figure this out now.
The 4 .txt files you attached in the previous post are sufficient, for now at least. You may need to get the .DATs from the P3 later though.
 

Members online

Forum statistics

Threads
143,066
Messages
1,467,358
Members
104,936
Latest member
hirehackers