Hi All

I've just experienced a flight that no user wants to ever go through.

I'm fairly new to drone flying and today I took my Mavic out for it around 10th flight. It went up fine and was flying around and acting as it should, however suddenly it started throwing GPS errors. I initially tried to send it home but this failed, it then started to fly off on it's own in the distance and I was unable to control the drone myself through the controller.

It eventually landed suddenly around .5 miles away from me in a field.

After hours and hours of searching through the field I have been unable to find the drone and now at a lost as to what I should do. This is obvioulsy not user error and a malfunction with the drone.

I'm not sure how I go about sending data/logs to the community or DJI so maybe this is a start?

Does anyone know whether or not this will be covered under warranty?

Thanks in advanced.

Sam

Are you using iOS or Android? There's a TXT file on your mobile device that contains some information about the flight. For iOS watch the video below ---
For iOS watch this video once you have the txt file on your laptop/PC then upload it to here...http://www.phantomhelp.com/LogViewer/upload/ then copy the link then paste it on this thread
Im not sure how to get it off an Andriod

Have you checked the FIND MY DRONE function.

I'm not sure how I go about sending data/logs to the community or DJI so maybe this is a start?

If you'd like someone here to suggest places to look then upload the flight log from your mobile device as RCKable suggested and provide a link to it in this thread. The instructions for accessing it are provided on the PhantomHelp upload page.

Does anyone know whether or not this will be covered under warranty?

Possibly, but because most lost drones are caused by pilot error DJI probably won't take responsibility for it without some evidence that it was caused by a product defect. They'll want you to synchronize the flights recorded on your mobile device with their server and open a case.

Open the dji app - on the first screen before you Enter the devise - top right corner are 3 horizontal bar - open that menu and click on find my drone.

It should show a map with your drone location - click on the red aircraft icon and it will show the GPS coordinates - but go to the location shown on the map at FIND MY DRONE and good chance yr drone is there.

How do you know it landed .5 away ? Was that some previous home position maybe ? If you know it landed .5 away you should be able to find it by last position on the flight log map or as above use find my Drone.

RCNJ Posted at 2017-7-16 12:09
How do you know it landed .5 away ? Was that some previous home position maybe ? If you know it landed .5 away you should be able to find it by last position on the flight log map or as above use find my Drone.

as happened with me when it lands some distance away is typically because the battery got to critical and then the drone lands where it is.
Ideally this situation is to be avoided but for many of us we learn from experiance, if we are able to survive it.

Thanks for the responses everyone.

I'll load up my TXT file from my iPhone and get the data from the flight.

.5 mile away was a guess when I saw it in the sky.

The app is saying my drone is a few meters away from where the home point was. This is obviously not the case because it flew much further away from there. Suppose this proves the GPS isn't right.

Bekaru Tree Posted at 2017-7-16 12:09
as happened with me when it lands some distance away is typically because the battery got to critical and then the drone lands where it is.
Ideally this situation is to be avoided but for many of us we learn from experiance, if we are able to survive it.

Yeah critical and still in the air is a mad mixture at 30% I don't care where it is, it's coming home & down.

Samc123 Posted at 2017-7-16 12:13
Thanks for the responses everyone.

I'll load up my TXT file from my iPhone and get the data from the flight.

What device do you use ? Did you wait for home point recorded before take off ? What are the surroundings like ? Gps I've seen on some posts has gone from 16 Sats to zero quickly, are you using android or iOS ?

Samc123 Posted at 2017-7-16 12:13
Thanks for the responses everyone.

I'll load up my TXT file from my iPhone and get the data from the flight.

there are 2 map features - have you got to the map in FIND MY DRONE section?

I did wait for home point to be set, I always do before flight. I use iOS on iPhone 6S

I've gone to the FIND MY DRONE section but this just shows a location that is near home point, which I know for fact it flew a lot further away (when I lost control, had a mind of its own and flew on its own)

Hi Sam - I had the exact same problem you did. I was flying for about 30 - 50seconds when all of a sudden it did the same as you  - throwing gps errors then went on it’s own and flew away.trying to deal with DJI since June 18 to no avail . They keep asking for the txt file,which I have sent three times now as well as the video - which doesn’t match up with the gps data. This has been very frustrating as I am not getting any assistance from DJI at all. You are the 10th person that has similar problems - not pilot error but product error. Shame on you DJI

fans12f8d10e Posted at 2017-7-16 12:59
Hi Sam - I had the exact same problem you did. I was flying for about 30 - 50seconds when all of a sudden it did the same as you  - throwing gps errors then went on it’s own and flew away.trying to deal with DJI since June 18 to no avail . They keep asking for the txt file,which I have sent three times now as well as the video - which doesn’t match up with the gps data. This has been very frustrating as I am not getting any assistance from DJI at all. You are the 10th person that has similar problems - not pilot error but product error. Shame on you DJI

Upload the flight log to PhantomHelp and provide a link to it, preferably in a separate thread and the folks here can take a look and may be able to help. You mentioned that there's also a video, and that can also sometimes be useful, so please also upload it to YouTube or otherwise make it available.

Thanks for your input fans, shame that DJI are dealing with the issue slowly.

I'll grab the data tomorrow and give DJI a call as well as post on here.

Devastated is an understatement right now

Samc123 Posted at 2017-7-16 12:46
I did wait for home point to be set, I always do before flight. I use iOS on iPhone 6S

I've gone to the FIND MY DRONE section but this just shows a location that is near home point, which I know for fact it flew a lot further away (when I lost control, had a mind of its own and flew on its own)

Sam - on a previous occasion i lost my drone and could see it landing about 400m from me - there were water pools about and so i ran towards where it looked like it had landed but was nowhere to be found. Ii had to get my dogs back to the car which was another about 300m away and about 25 degrees differant direction.
Long story short - despite i saw it landing (but not fully landed) at one spot it then did in fact manage to return to home as i discovered when i got to my car - it landed not exactly at the home point but so close.
I still do not understand how it got there from where it was when i last saw it.
Check your map locations and search for yr drone there even if you think  that it cant possibly be there - u have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
I think before you and fans beat up on dji and go blaming them for yr situation  u should be absolutely sure it was their fault and not yrs - looks to me at this point as though you both suffered pilot error.
i really wish u would follow my search advise but  anyways good luck.

Samc123 Posted at 2017-7-16 13:07
Thanks for your input fans, shame that DJI are dealing with the issue slowly.

I'll grab the data tomorrow and give DJI a call as well as post on here.

Hang on a moment. For the people in this thread railing on DJI: You experienced GPS errors and then hit Return To Home; a function that relies on GPS to function properly. Why not simply pilot it back to yourself knowing that with a faulty GPS location, it was bound to go in another direction?

This was the result of pilot error.

i had the same thing today for the first time (i flew my mavic for 158km so far). something is bad with that new firmware (my personal guess, i have no evidence).

UCBarkeeper Posted at 2017-7-16 14:34
i had the same thing today for the first time (i flew my mavic for 158km so far). something is bad with that new firmware (my personal guess, i have no evidence).

Did you recover the aircraft? If so and you'd like me to take a look at the DAT file then upload it and I'll see what I can find out.

DroneFlying Posted at 2017-7-16 14:47
Did you recover the aircraft? If so and you'd like me to take a look at the DAT file then upload it and I'll see what I can find out.

i didn't crash. had it two or three times today. same spot. no metal and stuff, basically an open field. it was a compass error mid air, followed by imu heading exception, switching to atti . i need to do further testflights in another location. i had 17-18 sats, full bars.

to be fair:
i had a pretty good crash with a tree weeks before, i have opened my mavic up and fixed the gimbal cable. it was my first real flight after the repair. one of my compasses may be defective from the crash or repair. on the ground everything works perfectly, i get no errors. i did the stupid thing here and updated the firmware. so i can't really tell. but i somehow get the feeling, that since 0.900 fw we see a lot of atti mode due to lost signal/compass errors. maybe they changed something in the behaviour - maybe my mavic is just broken.

i never recalibrate - my calibration was good. next thing i will do is a whole set of proper recalibration and find another open field with zero interference.

I have already looked in the location on where it says the drone actually is.

Ephecktz - I am perfectly aware that the return to home function does no work with GPS. The issue here is when my Mavic went into ATTI mode, I was still unable to control it and bring it back to me. It had a mind of its own and flew in the complete opposite direction at some pace.

Judging by other forums posts I'm not the only one who has had this issue and I struggle to see how this was a pilot issue.

Sorry to hear about the flew away of the drone. Please log in the app the sync the flight records to the cloud if you had logged in the DJI Go 4 app, then look into the record of this accident, check the take off point, pull the progress bar to the end if its right, then you can see the location of the last signal of your drone. Try to find your drone there.
Please contact our support to start a ticket, we will help to make data analysis too, if it's malfunction, we will compensate your drone if it is under warranty according to After-Sales Policy
Here’s the link to contact us: http://www.dji.com/support

Thanks for your advice Thor.

I have just uploaded my flight data to Phantomhelp and it's picked up more locations but I'm not sure if this will be my controller/iPhone or my actual drone?

http://www.phantomhelp.com/LogViewer/JFR5F8ZRERKVEYJHZN89/

Is it possible to gain the exact coordinates from these?

Samc123 Posted at 2017-7-17 03:21
Thanks for your advice Thor.

I have just uploaded my flight data to Phantomhelp and it's picked up more locations but I'm not sure if this will be my controller/iPhone or my actual drone?

Is it possible to gain the exact coordinates from these?

Yes, it appears to have landed near 55.13304717, -2.13268723, and given that it's such a sparsely populated area is probably still there. The Mavic is small and can sometimes blend in with the ground, so you'll probably need to be pretty close to see it, but I'm confident that it was and very likely still is in that location. Good luck.

Hello,
I had the same problem.
After engaging a rth procedure, once arrived above me, my drone lost all the gps signals, the compass, and drifted over 300 meters. He was totally uncontrollable. I took over the control by miracle in ATTI, but from now on, I have no more confidence.

DroneFlying Posted at 2017-7-17 03:43
Is it possible to gain the exact coordinates from these?

Yes, it appears to have landed near 55.13304717, -2.13268723, and given that it's such a sparsely populated area is probably still there. The Mavic is small and can sometimes blend in with the ground, so you'll probably need to be pretty close to see it, but I'm confident that it was and very likely still is in that location. Good luck.

Thanks!

I'm certainly going to have a look up there this evening after work.

Will keep everyone updated

DroneFlying Posted at 2017-7-17 03:43
Is it possible to gain the exact coordinates from these?

Yes, it appears to have landed near 55.13304717, -2.13268723, and given that it's such a sparsely populated area is probably still there. The Mavic is small and can sometimes blend in with the ground, so you'll probably need to be pretty close to see it, but I'm confident that it was and very likely still is in that location. Good luck.

It appears that the GPS was still functional, so maybe the coordinates are correct.  I continue to be concerned that this is yet one more incident  of intermittent compass errors (and resulting yaw errors) which effectively cause lack of user  control (and RTH failure).

Samc123 - I don't see the GPS issues you mentioned. Could you have meant Compass Errors.

holding thumbs for u - hope u find it soon

Ladies and gents I FOUND! the Mavic in the exact location the logs said it was - massive relief.

Now my question is - was this hardware error? This is the second time my drone has flew off on it's own and had a mind of it's own.

Am I best sending this back to DJI or the store I bought it from?

Thanks all for your responses, much appreciated.

EDITED - to remove bad advice.

Samc123 Posted at 2017-7-18 00:41
Ladies and gents I FOUND! the Mavic in the exact location the logs said it was - massive relief.

Now my question is - was this hardware error? This is the second time my drone has flew off on it's own and had a mind of it's own.

Ladies and gents I FOUND! the Mavic in the exact location the logs said it was - massive relief.

I'm very glad to hear that.

Now my question is - was this hardware error?

It's impossible to say at this point. If you'd like to provide the DAT file for the flight from your Mavic someone will look at it and may be able to tell you why this happened. I'm sure DJI would also be willing to analyze it, though they'll probably want you to send the Mavic to them.

The instructions for retrieving the DAT file are here, and the correct one will have a timestamp corresponding to when the flight occurred and will probably be quite large (in the tens or hundreds of megabytes). Once you've retrieved the correct file you'll need to upload it to DropBox or something similar and then provide a link to it in this thread.

Am I best sending this back to DJI or the store I bought it from?

If you're wanting a replacement I'd return it to the store where it was purchased. If you return it to DJI you'll probably get back someone else's refurbished Mavic in exchange and it would likely take longer than a store exchange. But keep in mind that without knowing the root cause of your problem there's no guarantee that the next one won't have the same problem.

onefourten Posted at 2017-7-18 01:30
I had an instance of Fly Away.. I lost all sats from GPS in one go.. it looked like the GPS had malfunctioned... someone advised me to calibrate the compass and fly again. That went well and I calibrate the compass every time I fly now - no problems since then.

I would go out and fly again calibrating the compass every time and start small to build confidence again.

I would go out and fly again calibrating the compass every time and start small to build confidence again.

Calibrating the compass before each flight shouldn't be necessary and is a risky approach that could result in a bad calibration. If the DAT file from the problem flight is still on your Mavic and you'd like someone to look at it then upload it using the instructions I gave the Sam in the prior post.

DroneFlying Posted at 2017-7-18 02:13
Ladies and gents I FOUND! the Mavic in the exact location the logs said it was - massive relief.

I'm very glad to hear that.

Thanks Droneflying.

I'll grab the .DAT file and post it up on here.

I think I'd feel more comfortable getting a replacement than using the current aircraft. Hopefully this .dat file will provide some more evidence as to what happened and whether it does need replacing or not.

Samc123 Posted at 2017-7-18 00:41
Ladies and gents I FOUND! the Mavic in the exact location the logs said it was - massive relief.

Now my question is - was this hardware error? This is the second time my drone has flew off on it's own and had a mind of it's own.

Great ending!  I've been following this thread hoping for a positive outcome.  Now I'd like to know the root cause of the issue.

Samc123 Posted at 2017-7-18 04:41
Thanks Droneflying.

I'll grab the .DAT file and post it up on here.

Yes, please follow DroneFlying's instructions and  post the DAT file.  That evidence may help determine the nature of a hardware or firmware problem.  There have been way to many similar incidents to be coincidental.

DroneFlying Posted at 2017-7-18 02:15
I would go out and fly again calibrating the compass every time and start small to build confidence again.

Calibrating the compass before each flight shouldn't be necessary and is a risky approach that could result in a bad calibration. If the DAT file from the problem flight is still on your Mavic and you'd like someone to look at it then upload it using the instructions I gave the Sam in the prior post.

Thank you for the correction. It can be a pain to find a consistent message some times. Apologies to Sam for the bad information.

I do still have the DAT from that bad flight. The Dropbox link is here https://www.dropbox.com/sh/k2l0y ... mqToy7qRL9j4Qa?dl=0

Apologies again to Sam for the slight hijack.. and thanks to DroneFlying for the help!

Hi All,

Annoyingly my partner returned the drone straight back to Argos (UK Store) the day after before I had even chance to grab the .DAT file (grr...) Would have been interesting to see what went wrong. Can send over the app log's if anyone is interested?

The good news is that the store sent me out a replacement straight away with no questions asked.

Thanks again for all your help

onefourten Posted at 2017-7-19 02:16
Thank you for the correction. It can be a pain to find a consistent message some times. Apologies to Sam for the bad information.

I do still have the DAT from that bad flight. The Dropbox link is here https://www.dropbox.com/sh/k2l0y ... mqToy7qRL9j4Qa?dl=0

I looked at the DAT file and what it shows is that the heading (yaw) derived by the IMU doesn't match what the compass / magnetometer (magYaw) says it should be, which is what eventually triggered ATTI mode. In the graph below, you see yaw (the purple plot) and magYaw (yellow) starting to diverge at around 68 seconds into the flight, and then again at around 74 seconds. That second divergence is the one that triggers ATTI mode (indicated by the blue shading); the divergence is greater that second time and at one point yaw and magYaw wind up about 35° apart.

The interesting part about this is that the first separation occurred when your heading was roughly due south / 180°, and the second (larger one) while heading due north / 0°. If you watch the go App replay carefully you can tell that the indicated yaw (direction of the airplane) is different from the actual heading because the aircraft isn't flying straight even though you weren't applying aileron input. That's consistent with the gyro (green) data in the graph, which shows that the aircraft hasn't really rotated as much as the compass indicates.

Based on the small number of flights recorded on it I'm guessing that the aircraft was / is fairly new and just needs a compass and / or IMU calibration to correct the problem. If that still doesn't fix it then you probably should contact DJI and have them look into it, because I wouldn't know what else to suggest. Good luck and please let us know how it turns out.

DroneFlying Posted at 2017-7-19 06:35
I looked at the DAT file and what it shows is that the heading (yaw) derived by the IMU doesn't match what the compass / magnetometer (magYaw) says it should be, which is what eventually triggered ATTI mode. In the graph below, you see yaw (the purple plot) and magYaw (yellow) starting to diverge at around 68 seconds into the flight, and then again at around 74 seconds. That second divergence is the one that triggers ATTI mode (indicated by the blue shading); the divergence is greater that second time and at one point yaw and magYaw wind up about 35° apart.

The interesting part about this is that the first separation occurred when your heading was roughly due south / 180°, and the second (larger one) while heading due north / 0°. If you watch the go App replay carefully you can tell that the indicated yaw (direction of the airplane) is different from the actual heading because the aircraft isn't flying straight even though you weren't applying aileron input. That's consistent with the gyro (green) data in the graph, which shows that the aircraft hasn't really rotated as much as the compass indicates.

Good job Droneflying..