I don't know why this didn't end in disaster. On the way back from a 1 minute flight this afternoon my Inspire stopped responding to the RC and came down as if on 'Return Home' but about fifty feet off from its home point, and landed like a feather on the ridge of my house's roof and powered itself off. I had tried all sorts of gestures with the sticks, tapping the Return Home button, nothing worked. Those little hooks on the back two legs luckily hooked on the 12 pitch steel clad roof ridge and the motors shut down without a scratch. While I was deciding whether to go for a ladder I noticed that the iPad screen said 'disconnected'; then my eyes finally turned to the RC's power indicator LEDs and they were all off, even the power button's light. I figured I'd give it a try, and it powered up like normal. When it locked onto GPS, I finally forgot about the ladder and decided to try a quick take-off instead. Up she flew, and I was able to bring her home like nothing happened. What the heck? Why did the RC power itself off? And why did it return home fifty feet away from where it took off?
After the bird came home, I powered her back up and took another couple short flights. On one I tested out a 'return home' and it worked perfectly.

This morning I had installed the new firmware, v1.2.1.0 on both the Inspire and on the RC, as well as on the 2nd RC and two spare batteries. I'm pretty certain I didn't accidentally power down the RC: it must be just about impossible to do that by mistake. I'm stumped. Any ideas what actually went on?

Jlinn, just asking but I assume that you did a full set of IMU, Gimbal and report calibration in addition to the compass calibration post firmware update?

Yup on the compass & IMU calibration. I'll look at gimbal and report now. But we had a couple successful flights after, even 'return home' flights that landed right on target. The real strange part is the RC shut down.

My post to Facebook from today !!!

So here's what happened. Neighbour wants to see the bird in action so I pop next door. Do the full checklist procedure, set home point blah blah blah and take-off and landing gear raises. Didn't expect the amount of dust to be raised when I took off as on driveway .... (I'll come back to this). So flew around showed him up down left right etc etc and brought it back to about 10m away from me and about 5m up. Switched to ATTI to show him difference and switched back to GPS. Didn't want to land in the same spot due to the amount of dust so decided to land on the grass beside the drive. Flight time so far about 5 min. Noticed the landing gear was still up but obviously my button was still in down position as gear raised automatically. I decided I wanted to lower gear before landing on grass instead of auto mode so drive shaft not exposed to dirt and dust so switched lever to up, nothing happened as expected and then switched it down and gear lowered as expected. As we stood there in awe etc etc for about 10 secs I moved stick to move to the right to go to the grass and nada, no control ........ began to wonder and only had about a second to think when the bird just landed straight down on its own. Looked down and RC was off !!! I can only assume the RC turned off somehow? Battery level of bird was 83% and RC was 80%.
So questions,
1. How long would RC have been off before RTH would have activated ?
2. Checked flight log and no record or bird going back into GPS mode before lowering landing gear (should the switch back to GPS show on log, switch to ATTI does)
3. Related to Q1 above. When and if in ATTI and RC link is lost does bird switch to GPS hold before activating RTH or can it / will it drift on wind etc until RTH kicks in.
Am I right in assuming the following?
1. Bird landed exactly where it was because it was less than 20m from home point. A foot to the right and it would have landed on the Kerb between drive and grass and definitely flipped ! (maybe this needs to be changed to go home home regardless of distance !!)
2. Can I get flight data from bird and either see myself what happened or send to DJI or someone here who can determine why RC turned off and how do I do that.
Hope all above makes sense.

Jlinn .... How long between losing control and it coming down ? Were you within 20m of it like me and therefore it lands straight down over wherever it is instead of coming home ?

I had the EXACT same thing happen to me this morning.  Yes I successfully upgraded to the newest firmware on the Inspire and all my batteries.  Yes I recalibrated my IUM and compass.  I had 3 successful flights prior to today.  I noticed after about 1 minute into my flight that my app showed disconnected.  It immediately did a return to home.  I recallibrated my IUM and compass after that.  I then did 2 more flights with no problems.  

Any ideas?  I have to tell you that I walked away a little nervous this morning after that.

Wow that's not good a new bug! I have yet to test my inspire 1 with the new software I am hoping everything is working perfectly.

Another version of 'buggy' software

rsghowellnj@gma Posted at 2015-4-19 05:42
I had the EXACT same thing happen to me this morning.  Yes I successfully upgraded to the newest fir ...

rsghowellnj were you further than 20m away from home location and did it RTH to your set home location or did it go straight down ?

gdc2510 Posted at 2015-4-19 08:40
Have also seen this Disconnected notice fortunately while on the ground fiddling with advanced fea ...

Very good theory but unfortunately this isn't what happened with me.  I was not hovering.  Instead I was flying the inspire away from me when I received a disconnect.  As a failsafe (I believe) it engaged a Go Home.  The Inspire rose up about 60' and then flew back to me and landed right in front of me.

Needless to say, although this failsafe measure worked ... it was totally un-nerving.  What really threw me is I powered everything down and rebooted everything with a fresh inspire battery and it flew fine after that.

rsghowellnj@gma Posted at 2015-4-19 10:13
Very good theory but unfortunately this isn't what happened with me.  I was not hovering.  Instead ...

Thanks rsg. Reliability and predictability (which we don't seem to have) are key when flying!

GeneralToner Posted at 2015-4-17 09:14
Jlinn, just asking but I assume that you did a full set of IMU, Gimbal and report calibration in add ...

None of these things could cause the Remote to turn itself off though, it's a very strange situation...

Hello, same happened here after I installed the new firmware. But actually I think the upload was not completely successful and I'm also not sure that the batteries updated correctly. When I charge the batteries, the loading lights do not blink on one of the batteries.
Anyhow, on my first flight after the update, I had "connection lost" on my tablet after about one min of flight. I was lucky, after about 1 min of hovering, I regained control and I was able to land the drone.
Today I tried to reinstall the previous firmware but unfortunately this is not possible.
Does anybody know how I can completely reboot the inspire and upload the old firmware? I need the drone urgently for some filming in 2 days and I'm afraid to fly it in this condition...
Michi, Switzerland

gdc2510 Posted at 2015-4-19 10:56
Thanks rsg. Reliability and predictability (which we don't seem to have) are key when flying!

I took my inspire out today and it flew like a top.  Go figure.  Never lost connection to the app/controller.  Here are things that I made sure I did this time:

I turned off my cell phone an left it in the car instead of having it on my waist side (possible interference)?
Made sure that I followed the following sequence before flying:

• Turned on iPAD
• Launched App on iPAD (made sure the I clicked "Trust" the App)
• Turned on Controller
• Turned on  Inspire
  

So I don't know if it was something like I turned things on in the wrong sequence yesterday instead of what I outlined above today or whether it could have been the cell phone interference.

I took one extra step and disabled Autolock on my iPAD just in case this would put the iPAD in sleep mode.  Now when I turn my iPAD on it stays on with no chance of the iPAD causing the loss of connection.

Again un-nerving but today's flights went much much much better.

I also noticed after about a minute into my flight that my app showed disconnected. But by the time I said WTF everything went back to normal so I brought her back and landed, shut her down completely, I1, iPad, & RC turned it all back on and all has been fine ever since.

Mmmmm ...... App shouldn't be able to turn RC off.  I'm going to be nervous on my next outing making sure I've nothing within 20m radius of home location as It'll come straight down and land. (if it happens again which I hope it won't)

How many power LEDs did you have on the Tx?  The responses are correct the App cannot turn the Tx off.  You can click on the mode icon in the app, go to advanced and scroll down to the last entry.  Click on link.  You will then need to connect you computer to the USB port under the tail of the Inspire.  This will open a folder on your desktop.  Open that folder.  You will be able to see the flight data logs.  These are large files they record at about 3mb per second.  Please copy them to a hosted site like dropbox and share the link.  DJI will have to review the files.  

jimhare Posted at 2015-4-19 17:31
None of these things could cause the Remote to turn itself off though, it's a very strange situati ...

Yes a very strange event , never seen an rc control unit just turn off its power all by itself ...
You switched to atti and back , did the bird grab a new home point when you went back to GPS ? New home point now  being the roof ?  And when you took off from the roof it would have set that again as the new home point as you flew back and landed , if you study your flight in the replay on the pilot app you can see all the info and it will show what you did , and it will show when you go to atti and back to GPS , and any warnings of a new home point etc etc....

Chances are, not related. But, nowhere did I hear a Tx calibration after firmware update...just another 2 cents.

How hot was it when the tx shutdown?

Installed the latest firmware to my bird and RC successfully. So I just went thru the pilot app to check if everything was ok (I was using Nvidia Shield Tablet). When I was about to do a IMU calibration, noticed that my app showed disconnected. I looked down on my RC and to my surprise it was switched off! (No LED light, not warm on the RC) This was the first time I encountered this.
Switched on the RC and the connection was back again. Fortunately I was not flying my bird when the RC switched itself off.

Hearing all this and with Genettico thread on the  'Home position' bug. I'm rapidly loosing the confidence to fly. Reliability is number one priority! With all this technology I find it difficult to believe that we can not reinstall a previous firmware or is it more of a case not wishing to permit us to do so.

If I'm wrong and we can reinstall the previous firmware someone please point me in the right direction and I will eat humble pie.

Tahoe_Ed I'll get the logs out of mine and upload to dropbox (when I'm in office tomorrow with a 250mb upload link ) The landing on the roof scenario for Jlinn I can only assume its because his home location was within 20m of the bird. I wish this could be changed. It would give me more confidence in carrying out close inspections on buildings etc. I don't necessarily have the benefit of setting a home point 50m away from the work area so that if unit disconnects again it will go up and then home instead of going straight down.

My guess is it's just a faulty remote that is losing power for some reason.   
Why would there ever be a situation where the remote could receive a command to turn itself off without the user initiating it?   In other words it's not a bug.

There are thousands of Inspires out there and of everyone's remotes were turning themselves off we would know about it by now.

No one should lose any faith about the Inspire any more than if someone said they had an engine go out.  Of course these things are going to happen I rare cases so let's keep it in perspective.

Jimhare I would have though the same but very un-nerving. RC turned back on straight away and re-connected but I didn't get a chance to do anything because the bird was within 20m of me / home point it landed straight down and it was only about 2m off the ground. I'm going to have to make sure that I have a 20m radius of safe landing area for every job around home point So much for the accurate RTH function in this case. I'd love to know the reasoning behind the straight down RTH when within 20m ? Why not just go home ??

I just got back from flying through 4 batteries and nothing unusual happened. I still could not record a home point for the remote, but that has been happening since the upgrade. No RC shutdowns, not that this proves anything really. I do wish I had more confidence...

I think we need to get some more information

1) What type of device where you using Android/Apple? Model?
2) The cable where you using? If apple - genuine apple cable? if  Android the cable that came with the inspire, or another one purchased off ebay?
3) How much charge was in RC Controller? (2 lights, 3 lights? etc)
4) Where you using any other outputs at the time i.e HDMI?
5) What the back of the controller really hot (near the ports)
6) How long have you had the inspire for? did you fly on the previous firmware and if so how many times, did it happen with that?


I'm not doubting that it happened, I am just trying to see if there is a common thing between all reported issues?

mattd@internode Posted at 2015-4-20 07:49
I think we need to get some more information

1) What type of device where you using Android/Apple?  ...

Matt

In reply to your questions.
1. Android Galaxy Note 2 running 1.0.10
2. Original cable that came with the box
3. 3 Lights
4. No other outputs
5. Not that I noticed at the time no apparent heat. Flight time was 6 minutes when it happened
6. 6 weeks now 38 flights according to Pilot App !! This was 6th flight on new firmware no issues up to this.

Tahoe Ed .... I've downloaded all the flight logs from the Inspire and uploaded onto Google Drive. Where / who do I send link to. The file I believe is either FLY020 or FLY021 for the flight in question. (Times look right although time / data stamp changed when uploaded) I'm assuming original flight times is embedded in file.

Sent it to me at edward.windham@dji.com.

Thank you.

rsghowellnj@gma Posted at 2015-4-19 21:11
I took my inspire out today and it flew like a top.  Go figure.  Never lost connection to the app/c ...

I have a 3rd party lightening cable from AMAZON that someone had recommended.  I'm starting to wonder if this was my point of failure as to why I totally dropped my connection of my app to my controller.  If this happens again, I plan on trying to use a OEM Apple Lightening Cable to see if this fixes my problem.  I really like the short 3' cable but not worth the hassle.  Does anyone else have this cable and has experienced a situation where the controller lost connection with the iPAD (leading to a drop from the App)?

The lightning cable I'm using is the RCA coiled cord, also from Amazon.  Although it shows in the listing as being 4' long, when coiled it's only a few inches, and it fits perfectly between the remote and the mobile device.  And since it's a coiled cord, you really can't strain it when using it with the Inspire.  It's definitely pricier than some of the others, but if it's going to be more reliable in safeguarding a $3K investment I'm not going to quibble about it.

RC turned off on me mid-flight today! I as hovering 100 feet up during a hover and lost control, iPad Air 2 showed disconnected and RC was off. Happened maybe 20 seconds after first takeoff of the day. I usually go straight up to 100 feet and hover a bit to make sure everything is working, that is when it occurred. I had read this thread before and immediately turned it back on and canceled return to home. I then kept flying and had not other problem, great flight. Did not land, recalibrate or anything after that, just turned RC back on a kept going. I was on latest firmware 1.2.10, first time this happenned to me.

pmsurveys Posted at 2015-4-19 05:33
My post to Facebook from today !!!

So here's what happened. Neighbour wants to see the bird in acti ...

Hi pmsurveys, do you receive any update from DJI regarding the RC powered itself off?

PeteGould Posted at 2015-4-23 21:30
The lightning cable I'm using is the RCA coiled cord, also from Amazon.  Although it shows in the li ...

Pete ... thanks for the link!  Have you experienced any dropouts from the app using this cable?

rsghowellnj@gma Posted at 2015-4-26 19:34
Pete ... thanks for the link!  Have you experienced any dropouts from the app using this cable?

No dropouts that I associate with the cable.  That is, absolutely ZERO dropouts, ever, when flying in single controller mode, and over the month and a half we've had those cables (we have two) I've used both of them.

We ARE having a dropout problem in dual-controller mode.  But I associate that with the reduction in the number of available channels now that DJI has determined that some of the channels it was using were unlicensed.  Since the cables always work in single controller mode, clearly they were not to blame.

jimhare Posted at 2015-4-19 17:31
None of these things could cause the Remote to turn itself off though, it's a very strange situati ...

Hey Jim, My thought is a possible loose or poor connection some where along the power circuit in the Controller. I don't see any other way for the controller to shut down like described. Just a thought. Fortunately he still has everything in tact, lucky Guy.

PeteGould Posted at 2015-4-26 20:29
No dropouts that I associate with the cable.  That is, absolutely ZERO dropouts, ever, when flying ...

Pete,

Thanks for confirming the dropouts on the cables you have.  I will go out an order them from Amazon.  I definitely see the advantage of it being coiled.  

rodger Posted at 2015-4-26 20:43
Hey Jim, My thought is a possible loose or poor connection some where along the power circuit in t ...

rodger - I commented on this elsewhere but will put it here too for completeness.

There is ONE situation I see in which the controller could shut down due to firmware.  Obviously I don't know the design and I don't have insider information, so this is conjecture.  But it's just too suspicious that several controllers have all done this, and all of them seem to be after a recent firmware revision.

Consider: if your controller is on but your Inspire is not, sooner or later the controller will start beeping.  Awhile after that, if there continues to be no connection, it will shut off.

In my view that means the firmware has a hook available to it to shut down the controller.  The process of determining that there is no connection, sounding a repetitive beep signal, running a timer, and eventually shutting off the controller, are most likely accomplished under processor control as instructed by the firmware.  If there is a BUG in the firmware, the same function that can be used to deactivate the controller after an interval of no connection could malfunction and shut it down instantly, connection or no.  All it needs is an errant instruction due to a bug.

Just my $0.02.  I haven't had it happen.  But the idea that several people have all suddenly developed loose connections in their controllers after a firmware update isn't sitting quite right.

PeteGould Posted at 2015-4-27 02:54
rodger - I commented on this elsewhere but will put it here too for completeness.

There is ONE si ...

Thanks for the input Pete. Anything can happpen and go wrong. As I stated it was a possibility that there may be a intermittent power connection. In the case that is stated, he stated that there was no beeping, it just shut down on him with no warning at all. Everything was going fine and the the Controller just quit on him. When he powered it back up, things were fine and normal. Firmware or Hardware??? I don't know? It was just a thought as Jim stated that it seemed almost impossible. Obviously it is an intermittent issue which makes it a trouble shooters nightmare!  

In regard to above, it will be a process of elimination. I am happy that he did not lose his Inspire and investment and there was no damage to any property or his Inspire. That is the best part. Let's see if it springs up with other user's? It could have been an Area 51 Fluke?