Why doesn't my Phantom talk to me?

[ElGuano]

I have yet to read a reaction by someone actually having done the same as I did and who located the source of the sound with his/her own ears. And as I said. In MY FC40 I can clearly hear it coming form the centre of the body and therefore I cannot report anything else.

Well, to answer your question explicitly I've done exactly as you describe with my own Phantom, including desoldering the ESCs and motors, and running the FC powered in all states. There is no sound with the ESCs disconnected and the FC/mainboard powered. There is no sound with the ESCs connected and motors disconnected and the FC/mainboard powered. There IS sound with the ESCs and motors connected and the FC/mainboard powered.

I don't have an FC40, maybe something has changed. But it should be a standard Phantom with a 5.8ghz receiver module. If you care to find out for sure, I suggest you remove to the top shell and actually run the experiment. The motor chimes are a well-known fact, and if you have a build that's somehow different, it would be worth knowing. But until that's proven, it's more likely that you're simply mistaking the chimes as coming from the inside, since all four motors are going at the same time and it is quite loud (annoyingly so), so the aural characteristics are fooling your ears.

 

[thongbong]

This is actually the first time ive heard of it. The sound actually does come from the motors. You can actually feel them vibrate. Its louder in the center of the phantom because the arms act like resonating chambers. If you consider that speakers are in a sense electromagnets and so are motors, its not hard to reason why. But very cool indeed!

 

[ElGuano]

This is actually the first time ive heard of it. The sound actually does come from the motors. You can actually feel them vibrate. Its louder in the center of the phantom because the arms act like resonating chambers. If you consider that speakers are in a sense electromagnets and so are motors, its not hard to reason why. But very cool indeed!

It is certainly not intuitive! When I first learned this, I had to test it out for myself. That's what I love about this hobby, you can really dig in and get your hands dirty, and test out most any claim in a controlled, experimental manner

 

[OI Photography]

Ben, there's another easy way to prove/disprove the theory: Just disconnect the power lead to the NAZA (from the mainboard to the X1 port), and then connect your main battery (to the usual XT60 port). What do you hear?

 

[ElGuano]

Ben, there's another easy way to prove/disprove the theory: Just disconnect the power lead to the NAZA (from the mainboard to the X1 port), and then connect your main battery. What do you hear?

Then he'll say it must be coming from the mainboard

 

[OI Photography]

Ben, there's another easy way to prove/disprove the theory: Just disconnect the power lead to the NAZA (from the mainboard to the X1 port), and then connect your main battery. What do you hear?

Then he'll say it must be coming from the mainboard

Well my next suggestion was for him to disconnect 3 of the motors and then power up...that will make it real easy to tell where the sound is/isn't coming from. But I hoped the simpler test would be enough

 

[Big Ben]

I'm not going to do any of those tests as I don't find it important enough. I don't claim what is making the sounds just the location I hear it. I just tried it a few times again and when I (again) place my ear near a motor the sound just doesn't come from it. I do feel them slightly vibrating but that doesn't indicate a causal relationship between the two. They are just concurrent.

I expect the sounds are a result of the Phantom doing a self-test to check on vital components working/responding correctly and possibly to signal audibly things are OK. For that reason alone I can imagine (and this is pure conjecture) that disabling one of those components (ESC/motor) results in the initialisation failing resulting in the Phantom not producing a sound that is supposed to indicate everything is working OK... because it isn't with a missing ESC. The motors vibrating could simply be the effect of such an initialisation check. That would make perfect sense. Whether it is an accurate description of the facts... I don't know.

 

[ElGuano]

It will beep the same pre-post init scale out of a single motor even if three ESCs are missing. No offense Ben, you can believe and say whatever you want, but I just want to make it a point for other new pilots who may stumble upon this thread, there's no speaker in the Naza or on the main board, the sound is emitted through the motor bell housings.

 

[stupilot]

Hello,

My new Vision 2 (just out of the box this week) flies great - but on startup it doesn't make the second set of "B-B-B-B" sounds, which I have heard (in this thread and others) is the ESCs reporting. Should I be worried about this?

Again, I didn't realize this was "abnormal" until after I had already flown the thing (was watching some online videos and noticed that those phantom visions made the second set of "Beeps" after the scale). Now I am wondering how worried I should be about this. Is this thing going to fall out of the sky? I heard that the P2V+ does not routinely make this noise - is it possible that DJI changed it on the Vision as well?

Thanks.

 

[ElGuano]

Hello,

My new Vision 2 (just out of the box this week) flies great - but on startup it doesn't make the second set of "B-B-B-B" sounds, which I have heard (in this thread and others) is the ESCs reporting. Should I be worried about this?

Again, I didn't realize this was "abnormal" until after I had already flown the thing (was watching some online videos and noticed that those phantom visions made the second set of "Beeps" after the scale). Now I am wondering how worried I should be about this. Is this thing going to fall out of the sky? I heard that the P2V+ does not routinely make this noise - is it possible that DJI changed it on the Vision as well?

Thanks.

Abnormal is a constant beep....beep....beep....you won't get the ascending scale at all if the error is persistent.

The Vision + should only make the ascending scale on startup, no extra beeps at the end. I think the E300 adds one extra beep at the end, and the Vision has 3-4 extra beeps at the end...not sure why there's a difference, could be denoting different ESC types. The P1 ESCs don't have the extra beep either.

 

[ElGuano]

Believe it or not, people have run phantoms without the top shell. The hit to structural integrity makes is really unwise!