Hi and need some advice

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Hi all, I am new here, so be gentle please :)

So P3S is not my first drone as I have "practiced" with flying cheap drones before and loved it. I am not an expert but feel comfortable flying a drone. I finally decided to get a "real" drone and purchased a refurbished P3S. It arrived a few days ago and I did a few test flights outside of my house and of course in P-GPS mode this thing is a dream - nice and steady and easy to control. I was not brave enough to take it out too far or fly manually too much (although I did a little).

Today when I turned it on, I got a notification that a new firmware is available and I decided to upgrade. All went well and since it was raining outside.... I did something incredibly stupid which of course is my fault and lack of thinking. I decided to "just take it up and down" in the middle of my family room to test it after upgrade. I know I know, very very dumb move for several reasons. Well, my family room has about 18ft ceiling so I thought I had enough room to take it up and down and in fact, the first time it went well - I took it up 5 - 6 ft high did a few turns, rotated it, and landed it just fine. I should've just turned it off, but I decided to do it again. So I took it up again a little and did a few turns, and this is as they say **** hit the fan. The drone all of a sudden started going to one side very quickly and in my clumsy attempt to save it from plunging it into the wall I made things worse. Long story short - it hit the ceiling, hit the wall, dropped on the floor, and had some damage which I need to deal with now. The aftermath - gimball was torn off the craft and appears to have no damage at all but I do need to replace 2.4Gh antennas (part 97) since the wires were ripped off. I also need to replace the vibration absorbing board (part 83) since one piece broke off which probably saved my gimbal/camera. And one propeller has a small crack so I need to replace a propeller too. Other than that it appears to have no scratch on it anywhere and gimbal/camera look flawless - but I can't check them until I get everything re-connected again. So... a few questions:

1. The drone came with 1 year warranty but since I crashed it, I am assuming my warranty at this point has gone bye-bye?

2. Since replacing the antennas requires opening the body, which I am fine with, this will also void the warranty if I fix it myself, right?

3. I'd like to understand why the drone did not listen to my commands right before the crash - I was trying to bring it down but it went up and hit the ceiling. I get that since it was inside and compass/GPS may have been confused so maybe it tried to fly home which means it would try to raise to RTH height... but I thought that if I control it, it should not do that. It could not loose connection since I was just a few feet away. Log is here: Phantom Log Viewer - PhantomHelp.com and it shows a few "Speed Error" messages at the end, but I am not exactly sure what that means so I would appreciate any insights.

Was hoping my first post would NOT be about crashing my new drone... but here I am.

Thanks.
 
Last edited:
First of all, Welcome to the forum!

With out looking at the Log, (I will). :)

I doubt your GPS signal was strong enough or didn't stay strong enough.

If there is a conflict between the compass and the GPS, it won't try to RTH.

Rod
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I'm surprised by the satellite count, but I say it went into Atti mode because of a conflict of compass and GPS data. I think from the past that can give you the speed error.

Look at you home point distance and speeds. Is your family room that big? ;)

I actually thought that you hit the ceiling fan. :eek:

P3A and P3P have VPS that looks at the ground / floor so it does have to rely on GPS.

I think the quality of the GPS signal is what happen.

Have you ever gone Geocaching?
Your outside standing still, the GPS can very your location 20-30' away.

Rod
 
Thanks Rod. You are actually very close to what happened - it almost hit the fan, but I got lucky and it went between the fan blades :) Like I said, it could've been worse.

I totally get that GPS/compass were probably very confused inside, makes sense to me. What I don't get is why when I tried to land it, it actually went up. I'll fix the bird and it will fly again I am sure, but this definitely makes me feel much less confident about taking control when needed.

Any advice on the warranty questions? I am comfortable to fix it myself (already ordered parts) but curious if warranty is worth saving... or if it is even valid after crash
 
admittedly am a newbie to all things uav, but your satt count is as good indoors as mine is outdoors ! maybe you got caught in dirty air under the drone and things spiraled from there ?
 
Was the ceiling fan on perchance?
It is possible it had brief enough signal loss due to appliances/home Wi-Fi and triggered fail-safe RTH. It is recommended setting fail-safe to hover when indoors. It would have told you if it activated RTH though, assuming you hadn't lost RC to tablet Wi-Fi connection.
Low Battery RTH is another possibility.
 
Yup, the ceiling fan was on, and I got lucky that it didn't slice it in half - it was on very low though.

Good point, I should've set it to hover - but I didn't think I will be in position where I would need it to RTH. If it RTH did kick in, I would expect to see it in the log, right? This is the first time I am looking at P3S logs so I am not sure how much info it should have. I also seen somewhere that logs even show the controller sticks movements - after all, it could be me doing something stupid in panic. But my log does not show it, is there another log that I should look at?

Thanks
 

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