The eclipse

[Discoverydave]

I flew before the eclipse for 13 minutes just hovering at 100 feet, as a test. Everything fine. It just sat there.
launched again 5 min before total, hoping to film the shadow and darkening of my area. After about 4 min I checked my drone and it had taken off! I regained control and got it back, only to have it take off again! Got it back and quickly landed as totality had occurred.
Why did it take off? Interference from the solar eclipse, like an electro magnetic situation? Weird, but at least I did not lose it.
Anybody else experience that?

 

[Oso]

I flew before the eclipse for 13 minutes just hovering at 100 feet, as a test. Everything fine. It just sat there.
launched again 5 min before total, hoping to film the shadow and darkening of my area. After about 4 min I checked my drone and it had taken off! I regained control and got it back, only to have it take off again! Got it back and quickly landed as totality had occurred.
Why did it take off? Interference from the solar eclipse, like an electro magnetic situation? Weird, but at least I did not lose it.
Anybody else experience that?

Did you take off the second time with the same battery you had flown for 13 minutes, then flew with that same battery again for 4-5 additional minutes? If so, my guess is that it was trying to go home due to low battery.

 

[Discoverydave]

No switched batteries. Started with 100%

 

[Fly Dawg]

Just out of curiosity, how long did you shut everything down for ( Including the RC and app) before installing the fresh battery? If you did not shut down the RC and app, that could possibly have been an issue. Just guessing.

 

[Discoverydave]

Shut everything down as I was over an hour from start up again.
Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[ovrszd]

Totally not a techno guy. I can't imagine the eclipse having anything to do with control of a drone. But what do I know.

Sorry it didn't work out for you.

Cloudy here so I didn't even bother firing up the drone.

 

[sar104]

Upload the log file(s) to PhantomHelp or Airdata. That should shed some light on the issue.

 

[scs9825]

Today I was going to fly to take some video during the eclipse. Set up in a place that I've used several times that occasionally has given me interference warnings but I've always been able to start and take off.


Today it wouldn't let me start up until after the eclipse was over.


I'm a newbie and have only a guess or two as to what may have caused this, so I am asking for some help so I can understand how this works.

 

[sar104]

Today I was going to fly to take some video during the eclipse. Set up in a place that I've used several times that occasionally has given me interference warnings but I've always been able to start and take off.


Today it wouldn't let me start up until after the eclipse was over.


I'm a newbie and have only a guess or two as to what may have caused this, so I am asking for some help so I can understand how this works.

Whatever it was had nothing to do with the eclipse. What message did you get?

 

[Meta4]

I flew before the eclipse for 13 minutes just hovering at 100 feet, as a test. Everything fine. It just sat there.
launched again 5 min before total, hoping to film the shadow and darkening of my area. After about 4 min I checked my drone and it had taken off! I regained control and got it back, only to have it take off again! Got it back and quickly landed as totality had occurred.
Why did it take off? Interference from the solar eclipse, like an electro magnetic situation? Weird, but at least I did not lose it.

There's nothing special about an eclipse that should have any effect on your Phantom.
As always, the way to work out what happened during a flight is to examine the flight data.
Go to DJI Flight Log Viewer
Follow the instructions to upload your flight record.
Come back and post a link to the report it provides and someone here might be able to analyse it and give you an understanding of the cause of the incident.

 

[quaddamage]

When thinking about whether the eclipse affects drones, you have consider more factors than just electronics and the directly involved technology.

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss its influence.
It is like saying that commercial breaks in TV does not affect sewage system, or that a New Year is just a normal winter day and has no special effect on communication systems.

 

[sar104]

When thinking about whether the eclipse affects drones, you have consider more factors than just electronics and the directly involved technology.

I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss its influence.
It is like saying that commercial breaks in TV does not affect sewage system, or that a New Year is just a normal winter day and has no special effect on communication systems.

Do you have a hypothesis? If not, then mentioning other pairs of causally related events is not particularly relevant.

 

[Discoverydave]

Did read where the eclipse could effect gps systems. The earths magnetic field does fluctuate during the eclipse NASA describes expected impact of total eclipse on GPS so maby that is what happened.
Will take a look at the logs too.

 

[sar104]

Did read where the eclipse could effect gps systems. The earths magnetic field does fluctuate during the eclipse NASA describes expected impact of total eclipse on GPS so maby that is what happened.
Will take a look at the logs too.

The impact of which they describe as completely negligible except, perhaps, for high-precision uses, for whom small fluctuations in the ionosphere might introduce barely measurable changes in propagation delay.

 

[Numone]

Did read where the eclipse could effect gps systems. The earths magnetic field does fluctuate during the eclipse NASA describes expected impact of total eclipse on GPS so maby that is what happened.
Will take a look at the logs too.

Yeah, I think this is totally correct, the shadowing of the moon crossing the earth surface deffo effects GPS....
Anyway, I'm off to turn some lead into gold - seeya...

 

[Discoverydave]

Here is a link for the flight that took off. Airdata UAV - Flight Data Analysis for Drones and this is the link to the flight that I did about an 2 hours before the flight that took off on me. Airdata UAV - Flight Data Analysis for Drones
The only thing I noticed was it kept changing modes. Anybody want to anaylize the data?

 

[Numone]

As Meta4 stated, can you upload the txt file from the app to here then we can take a look. The Airdata info isn't useful..

 

[sar104]

As Meta4 stated, can you upload the txt file from the app to here then we can take a look. The Airdata info isn't useful..

Airdata is fine to interpret the log file, but you have to enable other users to download the detailed .csv output file, which was not done in this case.

 

[Discoverydave]

CVs file of the 9:20 flight https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1o1nhEi8V2toINMkFBttdeGzFXAkqdjh0UlbhBpfzyJs/edit?usp=sharing
CVS file of 11:29 flight that had the problem 2017-08-21_11-29-40_Standard

 

[sar104]

CVs file of the 9:20 flight https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1o1nhEi8V2toINMkFBttdeGzFXAkqdjh0UlbhBpfzyJs/edit?usp=sharing
CVS file of 11:29 flight that had the problem 2017-08-21_11-29-40_Standard

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your original description of the flight at 11:29, but the log does not seem to be consistent with it. Firstly you mentioned that it took off twice, but the log does not reflect that - only one takeoff. Secondly, that takeoff and the subsequent behavior correlates perfectly with the recorded stick inputs. The graph below shows the recorded RC throttle and the altitude of the aircraft.

Additionally, I normalized the stick input data and then integrated it to show the predicted altitude (dotted blue line). The only disagreement is around 215 seconds when it executed an uncommanded climb. That coincides with the RTH button being pressed. RTH was cancelled at 232 seconds.