I went through several phantoms, and now have 3 different drones  (including P3Pro), but I still try to use my Phantom 2 with gopro  camera.
I consider myself rather advanced pilot by now, and I was able to solve several problems with my drones. But now I am puzzled.

some 2 weeks ago, in middle of flight on a calm day, drone started to  act up. I could not pull it down, kept going up. then when eventually it reacted to  my remote and started to go down, it went sideways and i had hard time  to correct its flight. I eventually brought it down ok.

I checked for all firmware upgrades, did advanced calibration, compass  calibration, remote calibration, everything possible I did, just to make  sure all is ok. I reset to factory settings. And I tried to fly again.   All LED light codes are ok, and i see on my FPV screen that GPS works,  satellites are ok. Lights blink properly, showing constant contact with  remote control, no alarms, nothing. So, i tested again, and when I tried to  take off  - It went up like a rocket, immediately up on high speed, some 15 meters or  so, while I only tried with remote to bring it slowly up above my head.  It again took several seconds until it decided to descend - and then it  started to go down like crazy, I had to pull up the throttle to the max,  and in last second before crashing it went up - again like a maniac.  Then it started to go left and right on its own - like drunk (still  showing on telemetry reading all satellites OK and no alarms, with all  lights blinking properly. I had really hard time avoiding a crash, as it  went just crazy, drunk, berserk.  After a minute of trying i managed to  bring it down to a reasonable level and grab it (I had to duck down as  it went to hit my head, ha ha). Then, when I was holding it, motors  still were going crazy - like NEVER before. just from almost 0 to full  blast and all in between, nothing similar to usual behaviour when you  catch your drone.

i re-calibrated every possible thing, paired with with a spare old remote to see if maybe remote was at fault - no change. Still crazy. when on ground, all is normal, motors go evenly, it reacts to remote. the circus starts when it lifts up.

I did not have any crashes or hard landings which would affect anything  inside. All controls show proper operation, but it goes mad on every  flight. It is not a reliable tool, and now i am afraid to use it at all.
any suggestions?
This forum helped me before, and I hope some of you may know  what is going on. Would be a pity to trash it. but i don't know what to  fix.
Many thanks!
Derek                                                

So you indicated all calibrations including IMU etc?, all done on a flat level surface away from anything magnetic etc. ?
Are you showing at least 6+ satellites?
Possibly a bad barometer or compass?
Almost sounds like it is in limbo between Atti and manual mode.
Have you tried it without the GoPro?

Hello, which gopro are you using on your drone? BTW, have you switched off the gopro's wifi before flight?

Sounds like wifi interference

nope, sorry. i live in a single house in the woods. and i tried to fly in the middle of nowhere on a caribbean island. miles of forest around - no interference, nothing. so, that is not it :-(
i just can't find out what it IS...

Your experiencing gps interference from your gopro, when I flew your same setup a few years ago I had problems with interference so I made a copper sheild for the gopro. Maybe.

I would guess it's your imu. Did u do a check on the imu?

Nothing last forever, if everything did we would all be driving around in model-t's. Maybe it's time to buy a P4.

i do have 3 other drones, including hexa, p3pro, but everything has its use, so i hoped not to trash this one. i still could work with it.
Go pro does not interfere with it and does not have GPS, i used it for 3 years, and this is original DJI setup with gopro and gimbal. maybe you mean interference of go pro connected via WiFi to a phone app. I would never do it. i tried 3 years ago and it affected flying safety big time.
Maybe it is IMU, yes. but all tests using DJI software show OK, ready, no errors. weird...

yes, i tried it without go pro. and i would never have gopro wi fi switched on. i learned hard way 3 years ago :-) I killed one drone that way...
it is gopro hero 3+ black, the one the ZenMuse gimbal is made for.  Everything re-calibrated - more than once...
thank you all for your comments/suggestions

Sounds like you have a bad ESC card.

My bet is the Naza M sensors locked up and now you are getting erratic flights. You may try taking out the Naza unit and tap it on the desk and the see if it broke lose and works again. Don't forget after doing that to re calibrate the IMU. If that doesn't fix it time for another Naza controller. That's my two cents.

roy@mcscomputer Posted at 2016-4-13 05:21
My bet is the Naza M sensors locked up and now you are getting erratic flights. You may try taking o ...

thanks for this suggestion! I will try it over the wekend and report back! Cheers!

pobox278@gmail. Posted at 2016-4-12 11:51
Sounds like you have a bad ESC card.

I actually had the same exact thing going on with my Phantom 2 Vision+. It turned out to be the ESC card was going bad on one of the motors. Like the above user, I had no major crashes until it started acting up and doing almost exactly what the user described above. It wanted to climb uncontrollably even while I was trying to get it to descend. It wanted to drift and was extremely hard to control.

Ultimately after a lot of trial and error I finally popped it open to check the ESC cards for the motors. What I found wasn't easily apparent, but the motor wires were soldered on in such a way (factory soldered) that one of them actually rested directly on a chipset. As per my research, I'm told that these wires get pretty hot during operation (and I imagine the chipsets generate some heat as well) and the wire had actually started to melt into the chipset slightly and started to cause the malfunction. My best guess is that the motors ESC was malfunctioning in such a way that it was causing that motor to spin faster than it should and as a result the drone was speeding up the other 3 in order to prevent instability which caused it to try and climb and otherwise be uncontrollable.

Mind you the damage to the chipset was extremely small, so small I almost missed it if I hadn't had a good guess as to which ESC was potentially going bad because of how that 1 rotor was behaving.

If your attempt on the Naza M sensors doesn't help, I'd recommend doing a little trial and error testing to see if you can spot one of your motors operating differently than the rest. On mine the motor with the bad ESC unit was constantly the one that seemed to lift first which angled the unit, it also reacted differently than the others when starting and stopping the rotors. Again these weren't huge differences but the one in question would almost always stop differently than the rest. If you can narrow that down then I'd recommend popping off the top and checking that motors ESC unit for damage, especially around where the wires are soldered on and may lay across the chipsets. If you find any damage then its likely you have the same thing going that I had. I ended up replacing 2 ESC units (1 other ESC unit was starting to show alittle melting of the chipset too just like the bad one but wasn't acting up yet) and re-soldered them so that the wires didn't lay as close to the chipset and mine worked perfectly again.

Of course as fate would have it the Phantom 4 was taking preorders around the time I was troubleshooting it so while I had the ESC units on order based on nothing more than a hunch that was the problem, I took the Phantom 4 Pre-Order email as a sign of fate and bought one =). I'm pretty happy with the upgrade, and only keep my Phantom 2 Vision+ as a backup unit now.

pgrohr@riverrea Posted at 2016-4-15 07:25
I actually had the same exact thing going on with my Phantom 2 Vision+. It turned out to be the ESC card was going bad on one of the motors. Like the above user, I had no major crashes until it started acting up and doing almost exactly what the user described above. It wanted to climb uncontrollably even while I was trying to get it to descend. It wanted to drift and was extremely hard to control.

Ultimately after a lot of trial and error I finally popped it open to check the ESC cards for the motors. What I found wasn't easily apparent, but the motor wires were soldered on in such a way (factory soldered) that one of them actually rested directly on a chipset. As per my research, I'm told that these wires get pretty hot during operation (and I imagine the chipsets generate some heat as well) and the wire had actually started to melt into the chipset slightly and started to cause the malfunction. My best guess is that the motors ESC was malfunctioning in such a way that it was causing that motor to spin faster than it should and as a result the drone was speeding up the other 3 in order to prevent instability which caused it to try and climb and otherwise be uncontrollable.

I have a problem similar to the one described above, my drone is Phantom 2 vision. It started acting crazy after falling from my hands as I attempted to grab it upon descending.  The problem: The propellers spin well while on ground, gps signal fine, as I throttle up to hover, the drone goes completely nuts, speeds up like crazy and flies straight up and I'm completely out of control. The only way to stop it is to kill the motors. I checked and replaced all ESC's, all motors fine, did all possible calibrations including advanced and even hard reset the drone ..... all to no avail. What could the problem be, in my inexperienced point of view, it is either the main flight control unit or the main board. Can anyone please offer advice or possible solution.