DALLEN
 lvl.2
United States
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So my new i2/X5S with under 2 hours of flight time failed to lower its landing gear when filming on a remote tropical island's sandy beach. I was at 25% battery, warnings were going off, and no matter what I did, the gear would not lower. The TX started vibrating, and it was moments away from automatically landing and dumping the whole gimbal in the sand and probably doing a flip of death while having sand for lunch.
Every time I tried to grab it underneath with one hand, the altitude proximity snesors would cause it to bump up out of reach. Not wanting to lose some fingers, I ended up grabbing it from the back of the dual batteries just in time with my right hand while holding the TX with my left and killing the throttle as it swung downwards. Wow, epic blood pressure rise. Where is a full length thick leather welders gauntlet glove when you need it?! No amount of button pressing would manually lower the gear for my landing mode suitcase, so I figured out how to manually rotate the landing gear jackscrew with a screwdriver from underneath. The tech support call cneter in Souther California call forwarded to their call center in of all places, the country I was filming in. The guy on the other end of my international long distance roaming telephone call was utterly clueless about the product. Mindy here knows way more about the product and has been far more helpful after I returned Stateside and she confirmed the scredrive and jackscrew maniual lowering technique. I woild pay handsomely fo ra screwdriver with a tube end that centers of the screw slot. From an engineering standpoint an allen socket end in the jackscrew would center soemthign like a long Allen or Bondus ball driver, but it is less expensive to cut a screw slot than broach a female Allen head.
Now DJI is fixing it all, and they were nice enough to see that although it was probably just out of time warranty, it had so little airtime on it, they are replacing the "Middle Frame Module" and testing all no charge. Hopefully they will also correct the frequent ossu eof th ecamera being slightly yawed all the time to the left all the time. I did find online photos of the middle frame module, and the mechanical part couldn't have failed as it looks perfect, it had to be the servo. Are those servo gears metal or plastic?
I have to give DJI some props for that, doing the right thing instead of splitting warranty hairs. The DJI repair, speed of such, great communication etc has overwhelmingly been a pleasant impressive experience.
However, when asked, they said they are not in a position to know what a main frame module is or what it does. Considering it is DJI repairing it, and not a dealer, I found this answer rather incredulous.
And DJI was happy to repair my 2 hour unit instead of replacing it with a previously crashed and repaired used unit, so I was pleased about that too.
Lastly, the firmware version is about 4 months old. How many new versions have come out since May?
And last stupid question which I never fail to regret quite later, is there any planned porting over of the new ProREs RAW to the X5S for those of us who do not have the X7 and those budget busting lenses?
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