Hi,

I have a DJI Mavic air fly more combo. I received the notification to upgrade the firmware on the drone. The upgrade failed and the drone which was working fine failed to connect to the controller. I reached out to DJI and they had me send my drone in, after diagnosis I was informed that the core board on the drone is dead and needs to be replaced and the cost is $450.00. My drone is out of the warranty period.

Has anyone experienced this issue and how did you handle it.

I have never come across a firware frying the drone and upon posting in several forums a lot of the members said that the manufacturer has to take responsibility for the firmware damaging the drone becuase it was not an - user error. I believe that it was not my fault that the drone is fried because of faulty firmware.

Any guidance on how to resolve this issue would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
R

Hi!
You might be better off posting your question in the 'products' section of this forum.
That is way more active.

A firmware not properly installed will not fry your core...if you use at update the app and connected to Computer, is not possible. There is a possibility that your cooler from CPU did not started from various reasons, from dust to who knows what...and overheated CPU just failed. Ask DJI to give you a full report about the failure and possible cause in order to see what was the problem.

A user on Mavic Pilot forums suggested I try again using the DJI assistant 2 and that fixed the issue. The firmware updated and the issue was resolved. It saved a boat load of money for me.

I have to admit, forum users seem to be 100% better than DJI engineers who received my drone, diagnosed it and said that I need to replace the drone. I wonder how many more customers they are ripping off.  My drone had less than 5 hours of flight time and was in brand new condition. I would rate my customer experience as horrible. I will never buy another DJI product. Below is all the info they provided. I am glad I did not jump on it and spend the money to fix a issue that was caused by bad software. they did not provide a detailed explanation.

Dear Customer,



This message is from DJI Support. A quote detailing the cost to repair your product Mavic Air is included in this Email. Click Repair Progress Inquiry for the detailed damage information. For further inquiries, please contact support.us@dji.com.

Case Info.

Customer




Case No.




Quotation Date




Remark


NON WARRANTY: Dear Customer, Unfortunately, damage that is not caused by a product malfunction or is out of the warranty period is not covered by DJI aftersales policy. Dear Customer We'll either repair it or replace it with a product that's new or equivalent to new in both performance and reliability after payment has been received. For more information, please visit (http://www.dji.com/service/policy) - DJI North America




Item List

Core Board

Quantity: 1

Net Price : 239.00

Total Price: 239.00


Repair Service Fee

Quantity: 2

Net Price : 65.00

Total Price: 130.00



Shipping Cost

0.00


Total Amount

369.00


Discount

0.00


Total Payment (USD$)

369.00

So...if i understand correctly, DJI diagnosed your drone as "hardware fault, repair needed" and in fact was needed to start a new update?
The drone was physically present at DJI ? Or was just diagnosed from talks?
Because if it was at DJI and proves to be this, is a case of attempted fraud....In order to scam you for some money....
Of course, DJI is not at first, their employees are known from previous scandals that frauded a lot of people with fake repairs and money taken....It was actually a case of investigation in DJI this thing...

Yes, I sent my drone in to be checked, I still have the tracking information. I did some verbal trouble shooting and then mailed it in. It is a shame that they are scamming customers. I am p!ssed and will definitely upload this to all my social media sites so that others know DJI practices and can be wary of the scams that they are doing...shame one them.

I had the same exact issue, same diagnosis of a bad core board. I was lucky I suppose that my mini 2 was under warranty and they sent me a new drone. however the new drone would not accept the firmware update just as the old drone. After three days and a lot of attempts the new firmware loaded. Ive noticed a lot of loss signals between the RC and the AC so I'm not sure whats going on now.

ThreeStar Posted at 1-16 15:59
I had the same exact issue, same diagnosis of a bad core board. I was lucky I suppose that my mini 2 was under warranty and they sent me a new drone. however the new drone would not accept the firmware update just as the old drone. After three days and a lot of attempts the new firmware loaded. Ive noticed a lot of loss signals between the RC and the AC so I'm not sure whats going on now.

I think it is their standard response. I am not sure if they even look st the drone or diagnose it. Next one is not going to be a dji. I just submitted my case to BBB.

Enigma79 Posted at 1-16 16:53
I think it is their standard response. I am not sure if they even look st the drone or diagnose it. Next one is not going to be a dji. I just submitted my case to BBB.

I'm disappointed too, I have not been able to fly this thing more than a few minutes since November. I could not get the firmware to update and it would not fly, kept getting error messages, that went on for a few weeks.. Then after a lot of phone calls and on-line troubleshooting i had to send it in for repair.  It took a week to send out, a week to repair and a week to get back. I got a new drone and RC but still had the same problems trying to update the firmware. It did finally take but now I get frequent signal loss between the RC and AC, which is making it unreliable to fly.

That is not good, they should send you a new one. You could ebd up losing the drone and remember the dji refresh will only be honored if you are able to recover the broken drone.

After a DJI employee saw my post on FB he had one of the managers contact me to see what went wrong. I provided my case information and he got back with the reply below that blew my mind, they first said that the core bad went bad, now after discussing with their team they came back saying the code board can work intermittently. WHAT a LOAD of BS. He had the audacity offer me a discount coupon if I wanted to buy a dji product - chinese tactics to make more money, !$$*** cannot accept that the mucked up but they want to offer me a discount coupon. When I asked  since they mis-diagnosed the issue the first time, why can't they fix the drone, he said that would be a out of warranty issue and asked me to pay money. The manager kept calling me to provide updates after I asked him to send me written communication they sent me this, you can see that during the initial diagnosis they never mentioned anything about the board working intermittently. Now they are making this up to save face.      
DJI Customer Support （Support）

2021年1月26日 GMT+86:37

Hi Ramana,

Good day.

As mentioned in our conversation earlier, our relevant team had provided the following information:
*Core board issue was found on your Mavic Air when it is sent for repair under CAS-2474383-Wxxxxxx The core board needs to be replaced;
*The issue was diagnosed when your remote controller could not link to the drone;
*The issue may not be replicated when the performance of the part is not stable.

In addition, if you are thinking of purchasing a DJI product from our online store, please let me know. We will check for an available discount.

Best Regards,

John
Manager, DJI Customer Support
Website: http://www.dji.com/support
YouTube: http://s.dji.com/DJI-Tutorials

Update the firmware using your laptop or computer

Enigma79 Posted at 1-26 12:23
After a DJI employee saw my post on FB he had one of the managers contact me to see what went wrong. I provided my case information and he got back with the reply below that blew my mind, they first said that the core bad went bad, now after discussing with their team they came back saying the code board can work intermittently. WHAT a LOAD of BS. He had the audacity offer me a discount coupon if I wanted to buy a dji product - chinese tactics to make more money, !$$*** cannot accept that the mucked up but they want to offer me a discount coupon. When I asked  since they mis-diagnosed the issue the first time, why can't they fix the drone, he said that would be a out of warranty issue and asked me to pay money. The manager kept calling me to provide updates after I asked him to send me written communication they sent me this, you can see that during the initial diagnosis they never mentioned anything about the board working intermittently. Now they are making this up to save face.      
DJI Customer Support （Support）

Update the firmware using your laptop or computer

Yes, that is what I did and the drone started working. To hide their in competence DJi is saying that the core board can work intermittently. How can DJI sell products that have unstable electronics? They need to own up their bad work.

Same problem here. Got a basically new Mavic Air 2, first year of use, no accidents, no water damage, all good (amateur use, like one or two times a month) Then i didn't used it like for a month por two, stored in his case. When i took it out for use and there was this new firmware update. Downloaded it and installed it. After that there was no way of connecting the drone to the controller, tried all and nothing. After several hours on support call from DJI  they asked me to send it.

Main board damaged and need to be changed for more than 400 dls. How?...

By the way, of course it was out of warranty.....