I crashed my drone recently and after ordering the new shell I noticed when swapping the guts over to the new shell that the gps plug on the main board was broken off.

I ordered a new main board, installed everything, and turned it on.  Everything works, I have video, gps, etc.. but every time I try and take off I get the "activate aircraft" error message and I can't take off.

Any ideas?

Sorry I should mention this is a Phantom 3 Professional. I re-linked the RC to the drone, made a new account and tried to register the drone to the new account, tried everything I can think of.

Nothing seems to work.

Any ideas?

Sorry to hear about your crash.
It's not recommended to replace any parts of the aircraft by yourself which will affect the warranty.
For your flight safety, I'd suggest you to send it in for further diagnosis and repair.
You could fill in an online repair request form and apply for pickup here.You’ll get a case number automatically.
https://repair.dji.com/en/SelfRepair/Area

I have to say, in as much as I support DJI and the products they sell, it gets old hearing send it in for repairs or you shouldn't attempt any repairs yourself. I have replaced shells on 4-5 phantoms and had them completely disassembled. I can't say as I have purchased a replacement board or anything, but I have had everything out of these things you can, and never had a problem with any of them.
Now, that may not be for everyone I understand, but it kind of gets me when you are asking for help and the answer you get is send it in for repair. To me, that is not helping. If they would say you may have an electronic issue or something with a component, and it requires their engineers to test or diagnose would be one thing I would understand, but that is not what you were told. Why would those of us that have the ability to work on these things, and also enjoy doing it, want to spend more money on something we can do? It just seems that response is given a lot.

As far as the warranty is concerned, I doubt any of us are worried about that. I mean if you are still in the warranty period, I agree 100% you should send it in. Why would you not do that? But to say anything you do will effect the warranty is kind of a mute point to me if you have experienced a crash or something that is not going to be covered anyway. I'm not trying to be a pain here, just think they could offer up a bit more in some situations.

RicardoGray Posted at 2017-3-14 05:46
I have to say, in as much as I support DJI and the products they sell, it gets old hearing send it in for repairs or you shouldn't attempt any repairs yourself. I have replaced shells on 4-5 phantoms and had them completely disassembled. I can't say as I have purchased a replacement board or anything, but I have had everything out of these things you can, and never had a problem with any of them.
Now, that may not be for everyone I understand, but it kind of gets me when you are asking for help and the answer you get is send it in for repair. To me, that is not helping. If they would say you may have an electronic issue or something with a component, and it requires their engineers to test or diagnose would be one thing I would understand, but that is not what you were told. Why would those of us that have the ability to work on these things, and also enjoy doing it, want to spend more money on something we can do? It just seems that response is given a lot.

In complete agreement.

1. My drone is more than a year old so the warranty is gone anyways.

2. A simple shell swap and board swap is nothing complicated. In fact, there isn't anything complicated about the inner-workings of these drones.  

3. I don't need to send the drone in when the drone itself is functioning correctly.  I have no error messages, nothing out of the ordinary, other than a single message saying "activate aircraft" every time I try and launch.  

I got the exact same response from dji support.  After he told me to try all the things I've already tried, he just resorted to, send it in and let us fix it for a hefty fee.

The thing is many of the users that fix their own quads are often just as skilled as the repair staff at DJI. And if it is your drone you actually care about it and take your time and its not just one of a gazillion on your plate to quickly half fix and ship off.

It would be a wonderful service from DJI to have a proper technician monitor these pages (or be referred to by Mindy, Jamie, Thor and others) who could in seconds list the reasons for the "activate aircraft" message and other purely technical issues that come up on this forum. Surely DJI realize that not everyone wants to use the overloaded DJI support for AC that are out of warranty and could take many man hours to repair. Admittedly that tech may not be directly earning DJI much money but the goodwill would be huge and parts sales could increase if people had confidence in repairing their own AC.

Any ideas here? I crashed my drone and it's out of warranty and I also had to replace the main board (ESC controller, part 96). I could re-link the RC but I can't arm the motors because I get that warning "activate aircraft". In my case the gimbal has also some issues (camera got disconnectd to it, need repair). I already ordered a gimbal repair kit from aliexpress, but I was hoping to be able to fly this drone without camera in the mantime... I tried to update the firmware by putting the file in the root of the sdcard. But noting happened, not even a log file got written...

The drone is recognized as Phantom 3 Professional but I had an Advanced. I was told in the moment the camera is attached, it will recognize it's not 4k, but 2.7K so it should reognize it as Phantom 3 Advanced. May this be the cause? Need a working camera connected first?