New P2V+ user

[configurationspace]

Hey all,

Just thought I'd post my first experiences with the P2V+.

I've had it for about a month now and have had about 4 or 5 small crashes, from about 5 feet up in the air. I wasn't sure what triggered those crashes -- I was flying the P2V+ very low (5 feet!) and inbetween houses and trees. I suspect what happened is it lost a few GPS signals and had trouble accurately determining its altitude. Presumably it was attempting to lower its altitude deliberately because it suspected it had climbed a lot. I don't have a flight log so I can't verify this. Does that sound reasonable to you? In the end most of these drops were fairly gentle. Only two were violent, resulting in the gimbal mount getting a little twisted and the props getting scuffed up. But it doesn't seem like any real damage was done. I was able to un-twist it fairly easily, by hand.

I've had the P2V+ up to about 200m but I see from other peoples' posts that's nowhere near the altitude ceiling for these things... good to know! I won't be trying to break anyone's altitude records but I like seeing these things pushed to their limits.

The helipal.com webpage is a lovely resource for spare parts at reasonable prices. That was a nice discovery.

Other than that I've mostly been using the P2V+ to explore my neighbourhood. I'll get a carrying case for it soon and start flying it around some of the smaller islands near here. That should be fun.

I hope to make a bit of a project out of probing the USB port on the drone to see if some kind of "aftermarket DJI assistant" software could be built. It would be nice to be able to configure these quadcopters fully. If any of you have had any success I'm all ears.

 

[DBS]

Hey all,

Just thought I'd post my first experiences with the P2V+.

I've had it for about a month now and have had about 4 or 5 small crashes, from about 5 feet up in the air. I wasn't sure what triggered those crashes -- I was flying the P2V+ very low (5 feet!) and inbetween houses and trees. I suspect what happened is it lost a few GPS signals and had trouble accurately determining its altitude. Presumably it was attempting to lower its altitude deliberately because it suspected it had climbed a lot. I don't have a flight log so I can't verify this.

The Phantom gets its altitude from an onboard barometric pressure sensor so the gps idea is out as far as altitude is concerned...

How close together are the houses? Maybe prop wash or ground effect from being too close to another object?
Just guessing on that.

 

[cahutch]

When you're that close to the ground you need to keep an eye on it and manually control the altitude.
The barometric altitude sensor isn't accurate enough to keep it within a few feet. Nor is the GPS altitude that accurate. As the wind blows, the temperature changes the Phantom will rise and drop, perhaps more than 5 feet.
If you see it dropping to close to the ground, give it some throttle.

If you lost GPS signal, it will go into Atti mode and will drift with the wind which I suspect is what happened to you. Atti mode takes some getting used to and would be easy to crash if you were expecting it to be in GPS mode.