Hi guys
Below is our reply to Johan today.
Please understand that:
1) This quadcopter arrived in this state. Our initial check (before the customer pays anything) only confirms that there does appear to be a fault and that we can go ahead with the work requested of us (we offered to undo and refund all of our fees when this work didn't resolve the problem, and in fact spending 9+ man hours more on the Phantom has not brought us to a resolution).
2) We can ship worldwide, there is no looming deadline as far as we're concerned. We're certainly not trying to take advantage of Johan leaving the country as was suggested.
3) At this point we would suggest that we send the item to DJI. We would welcome their input. They were unable to help by phone other than to say that the Phantom contains several components with volatile memory which could conceivably be wiped. It's fair to say that these problems may have been caused by Johan's crash, by the journey here, or by something else entirely. The point is that these problems exist and we have swapped out the Naza (twice), the compass (twice), the GPS, etc to no avail. There would appear to be damage to the main board and Johan does not want to go ahead with any further work.
As above, we have offered to refund all of our fees and send the quadcopter back to Johan.
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Hi Johan
Dan and I have both spent the day so far working on your quadcopter. Whenever we try to arm the Phantom we get three fast red flashes on the LEDs. According to the manual (
http://download.dji-innovations.com...antom_2_Vision_Plus_User_Manual_v1.1.1_en.pdf) this means "Not Stationary or Sensor Bias is too big". The rest of the time we see slow yellow blinking LEDs.
We have substituted the Naza with another one (twice in fact, so that's 3 Nazas in total), we've changed the compass - twice (and we've already changed the GPS as you know). We've calibrated the compass(es) on several occasions, we've run the Advanced IMU calibration on several occasions - but the red LED sequence still remains whenever we try to arm the Phantom.
At this point only the main board, motors and ESCs have not been changed.
We have re-installed the firmware on the main board and on the Naza. We have calibrated the RC controller both in the Phantom 2 Assistant and in the RC Assistant software.
We've spoken to DJI and they are at a loss. They said that magnets could cause problems with the Phantom's electronics.
I have noticed that sometimes the Phantom 2 Assistant detects the Zen IMU, and the gimbal works, and sometimes it does not. Given this, and the fast that we've substituted every other component, my feeling is that the main board is damaged in some way.
I want to be clear that this Phantom arrived to us with these problems. Whether that was caused by your crash, your magnets, or being dropped by the postal service is hard to know. What we do know is that the problems exist, short of replacing the main board, we're at a bit of a dead end.
The only thing I can suggest is that we send this off to DJI in the Netherlands for their diagnosis. If they consider this a warranty job then they will repair it for free. If not they will send a quotation for the repair. We can then forward you the quadcopter to your address (UK or abroad doesn't matter, we can post worldwide).
Time spent on this today would have been more than the cost of the discounted Phantom offered before - but we won't charge for our time today as a gesture of goodwill.
I'm sorry that I don't have better news.
All the best
Drone Doctor