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CGO3+ lens replacement adventures

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Greetings.

Recently decided to replace the stock lens on CGO3P with pixAero. Got the parts, watched a few explaining vids to avoid surprises during disassembly since i've never stripped a CGO3 before. Went on with it. The "surgery" itself went without surprises - disassembled the camera, removed the sensor module, removed the lens mount, installed one from pixaero, installed the lens and put it all back together. In the end it even felt less complicated than i expected it to be (even the lens mount came off the board without much resistance and fuss). The end result - gimbal itself works perfectly - stabilizes, pans and tilts, but no wifi and status led is solid white all the way.

I kind of expected that this might happen, so i "sacrificed" a unit especially meant for that. However i did not expect that shall i fail, i'll not have a clue what i did wrong to avoid it next time (i still want that lens installed).

So my question would be - is anyone aware of the status colours of the led? Does this white point to a specific fault (right now i don't have a clue even if the problem is with the wifi module, sensor or the main board). Or can somebody suggest any other diagnostic techniques. Or maybe someone has a service manual around and is willing to share it to help me debug this issue further. I'm kind of reluctant to tear apart the next unit without understanding what i did wrong. I also tried to search for the issue, but there isn't much information around that is worth anything.

So if anyone has anything to suggest it would be greatly appreciated.
 
Is it possible the antenna connection to the RF board came loose during the process?

You can try to reset the wifi with the button indicated in the pic below. If that doesn't work then press them both at the same time. It's a bit easier to press them with the broken end of a toothpick.

Camera reset buttons.jpg
 
Thanks for the tip. I noticed the buttons, but i did not have a slightest clue what they were for. Will try that.

It is most likely not the antenna, as the led should change colors during bootup sequence. It's just solid white without change.
 
@Steve Carr this looks fun :)

* Short press on the right one, wait for 15-20 secs - nothing.
* Long press on the right one, wait.....nothing.
* Short press on both - white light goes out and returns when i release buttons.
* Long press on both (6-7 secs) - light went out and never came back. Even after restart of the copter :) But came back after a longer power-off.

Long or short pressing any buttons doesn't seem to have any effect anymore. But the stabilization and gimbal control still works. It's even unaffected by the button pushes.

Update - after the longer power-off the button-pushing doesn't permanently kill the statuslight anymore. But to sum it up - it's the same as it was before. Still thanks, was worth a shot.
 
Solid white means 'initialization'. Seems it hangs in ini-state and never comes out.
Please check first if all cables are correct plugged in. There is one from the MPU6050 (white circuit board) to send levelling to the gimbal. It has 4 wires. A second cable, 3-wire, is for UART (seems this needs to initialization and for flashing FW). And the third one, also 4-wire, (with the ferrit core on it) is 5V power supply. This is OK, because otherwise the white LED would not be on.

As last try, I would try to flash firmware again to the camera.

br HE
 
Will re-check the cables. As the matter of fact i have my doubts about the flat cable running from main board to the sensor - the whatever plastic thing that is supposed to retain it in the socket on the sensor's board doesn't want to sit in place. So i had to improvise a solution from scotch tape and foul language to secure the cable and attempt to push the pads on the cable against the terminals. This might be the culprit, but there is no easy way to verify that (apart from disassembling the whole thing and testing the leads with a multimeter).

Although i think that the cables from MPU6050 are ok, as the gimbal levels itself perfectly and is controllable from the remote.

As last try, I would try to flash firmware again to the camera.

br HE
Is the re-flashing doable without attaching the gimbal to the bird? I'd rather not fight with the motors as i try to push the buttons while it tries to stabilize itself.
 
Got it working. It was a case of bad connection, and the culprit was the socket on the sensor board for the ribbon cable between sensor board and the main board. After taking a dozen of macro photos of it i found out that a pin was slightly bent and this did not allow the retainer to properly seat in place and caused it to pop out all the time. After mending it and properly seating the cable it all came together fine. But after all my "adventures" i'd like to have a serious discussion with the designer of that socket.

Thanks for your advices. Unfortunately there isn't much information on that thing around, so it all came down to guesswork and "black box debugging".
 
Got it working. It was a case of bad connection, and the culprit was the socket on the sensor board for the ribbon cable between sensor board and the main board. After taking a dozen of macro photos of it i found out that a pin was slightly bent and this did not allow the retainer to properly seat in place and caused it to pop out all the time. After mending it and properly seating the cable it all came together fine. But after all my "adventures" i'd like to have a serious discussion with the designer of that socket.

Thanks for your advices. Unfortunately there isn't much information on that thing around, so it all came down to guesswork and "black box debugging".
Congratulations. Your persistence paid off.

I had a similar problem with my lens swap. However, I never found the problem, it just started working fine after I tore the camera back down and re-assembled it. Probably a bad connection too.
 
Congratulations. Your persistence paid off.

Thanks. Glad you managed to solve your problem too.

However now i'm battling with a new issue - the sensor and lens are slightly misaligned. And applying some tape under the mount sides cures it a little, but the result is still far from perfect. And i'm all out of ideas what else to try (if there even is anything to try).
 
Thanks. Glad you managed to solve your problem too.

However now i'm battling with a new issue - the sensor and lens are slightly misaligned. And applying some tape under the mount sides cures it a little, but the result is still far from perfect. And i'm all out of ideas what else to try (if there even is anything to try).
By "slightly misaligned" do you mean out of focus on one side of the image? If you talking about the pixAero 6mm lens, I get a bit of that too, as well as pretty significant vignetting. I'll be interested to hear if you come up with a solution.
 
By "slightly misaligned" do you mean out of focus on one side of the image? If you talking about the pixAero 6mm lens, I get a bit of that too, as well as pretty significant vignetting. I'll be interested to hear if you come up with a solution.
Yeah, that's exactly what i mean. But finally i managed to successfully align the 3.77mm using the same method and now it is giving a better picture than the stock. Will try again with the 6mm. I went full idiot with it for a day also, as i mixed up the sides and was adjusting the wrong one. Not getting any improvement managed to throw me off and i started doing sloppy job. But after letting it rest for a bit and starting again i got the 3.77 working.

There's not much to be done about the vignetting except to correct it in post processing. When you shoot DNG it's not an issue as CGO3+ images have surprisingly decent dynamic range and you can use it in post processing.
 
Yeah, that's exactly what i mean. But finally i managed to successfully align the 3.77mm using the same method and now it is giving a better picture than the stock. Will try again with the 6mm. I went full idiot with it for a day also, as i mixed up the sides and was adjusting the wrong one. Not getting any improvement managed to throw me off and i started doing sloppy job. But after letting it rest for a bit and starting again i got the 3.77 working.

There's not much to be done about the vignetting except to correct it in post processing. When you shoot DNG it's not an issue as CGO3+ images have surprisingly decent dynamic range and you can use it in post processing.
You are using DNG for stills to set the focus. In videos, I'll try using RAW more and fix in post.
Good luck with your 6mm lens.
 
You are using DNG for stills to set the focus. In videos, I'll try using RAW more and fix in post.
Good luck with your 6mm lens.
No, I use DNG for actual shooting. I used JPG for focus adjustment, but with the setting "Raw", as it seems to generate JPG without any "niceties" (sharpness, saturation, etc), which was good for focus checking. How i did it is that i "roughly" focused using the ST16 display, then made some JPG, looked at them via laptop and did the fine focusing this way. You can attach the laptop to the CGO3+ access point and look at the images directly in the browser, which saves you the hassle of pulling out the card and booting the gimbal for each shot.

Anyway, it seems i got the 6mm more or less working also. Just started from scratch and was more meticulous this time. The process itself looked more or less like this.

* focus one area, make note of the "focus ring" rotation angle
* focus other area, same note
* ... same for all other areas out of focus, hoping there are not much of them.
* then i looked which area was in focus at which rotation to determine whether it was closer to the sensor or farther away.
* disassemble the camera, apply tape to the side which is opposite to the one that focused when the lens was farther from the sensor (see attached picture - on the image my "farther" side was the upper, so i was applying the tape to the lower part of the mount to increase the distance).
* assemble the camera, rinse and repeat until satisfactory result is achieved. The difference between the rotation angles should decrease at each iteration.

Basically it took me 3 iterations, after which i was able to focus the lens more or less acceptably over all the image. I used this typical transparent packing tape, as it is thin enough. There is still some softness at the extreme upper corners, but those can't be fixed by the tape anymore (upper center is fine) and probably will be cropped out anyway (i usually crop my images at 2:3, not the sensor-native 3:4). So a non-issue for me. Luckily the 3.7mm pixAero didn't exhibit that softness.

I did use the "Raw" setting for videos also, as it produces quite "neutral" colours, which are better for post-processing (less clipping if you want to change something). However you probably can't compare the dynamic range of DNG and "Raw" MP4, so YMMV depending on what you use them for.
 

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I'm very skeptical of "RAW" video. I think it means just "flat". i.e. no tonal changes or sharpening. I'm no guru on video though. If you're applying a LUT to video you certainly want a neutral start with as much dynamic range as possible.

RAW stills I think of in a different matter. RAW (DNG) stills is just data captured on the sensor and must undergo demosaicing to create an image with color. Sometimes cameras can provide RAW files and JPGs. Yuneec enables that as DNG+JPG.
 
I'm very skeptical of "RAW" video. I think it means just "flat". i.e. no tonal changes or sharpening. I'm no guru on video though. If you're applying a LUT to video you certainly want a neutral start with as much dynamic range as possible.

RAW stills I think of in a different matter. RAW (DNG) stills is just data captured on the sensor and must undergo demosaicing to create an image with color. Sometimes cameras can provide RAW files and JPGs. Yuneec enables that as DNG+JPG.
I don't think the "RAW" video color setting is like .dng. Otherwise the video files would be many times larger. I've been pretty happy with NATURAL color setting for videos. That said, I shot this video in RAW and enhanced as necessary in post with PowerDirector:
P.S. Had to look up "demosaicing"
 
I'm very skeptical of "RAW" video. I think it means just "flat". i.e. no tonal changes or sharpening. I'm no guru on video though. If you're applying a LUT to video you certainly want a neutral start with as much dynamic range as possible.

I'm also skeptical about it. I might be wrong, because i haven't found anything about it in the manual, but from the looks of it this so called "raw" mode attempts to be similar to others' (x-)Log mode, so this probably is the mode one was intended to apply the LUTs to. All others - "natural, gorgeous" have different level of contrast, saturation and sharpening built in and thus sacrifice a bit (or a lot) of that range. However, when i played with it and googled around, some people seemed to spend too much effort and have bad results with "raw" and ended up falling back to the "natural". I personally didn't run into those troubles and got a couple of decent enough clips out of it after post-processing, but i didn't have anything to compare it to, nor do i actually use the bird for video for it to matter for me.

I originally just statied the fact that i have used this "Raw" mode in video. However i'm not sure that it actually gives you the increased dynamic range. Comparision to DNG was added just to illustrate my point. In no way i was meaning that you can get increased bit depth - in every case it's still same 4:2:0. Nor am i sure that it produces results comparable to honest Log mode.

But for focus checking JPG shot in so called "raw" is good. It doesn't seem to apply any sharpness, so no additional artifacts are there to confuse you.
 
I don't think the "RAW" video color setting is like .dng. Otherwise the video files would be many times larger. I've been pretty happy with NATURAL color setting for videos. That said, I shot this video in RAW and enhanced as necessary in post with PowerDirector:
P.S. Had to look up "demosaicing"

That's a good looking video!!! Smooth and well paced. Nice choice of music too.

I tried all the options for video as I'm a noob when it comes to video. I pretty much use "Natural" as well. I'm just learning Apple's Final Cut Pro X 10.4.2. Coming from a background in photography video is a whole new world for me. Dazzling and overwhelming at the same time.
 
I'm also skeptical about it. I might be wrong, because i haven't found anything about it in the manual, but from the looks of it this so called "raw" mode attempts to be similar to others' (x-)Log mode, so this probably is the mode one was intended to apply the LUTs to. All others - "natural, gorgeous" have different level of contrast, saturation and sharpening built in and thus sacrifice a bit (or a lot) of that range. However, when i played with it and googled around, some people seemed to spend too much effort and have bad results with "raw" and ended up falling back to the "natural". I personally didn't run into those troubles and got a couple of decent enough clips out of it after post-processing, but i didn't have anything to compare it to, nor do i actually use the bird for video for it to matter for me.

I originally just statied the fact that i have used this "Raw" mode in video. However i'm not sure that it actually gives you the increased dynamic range. Comparision to DNG was added just to illustrate my point. In no way i was meaning that you can get increased bit depth - in every case it's still same 4:2:0. Nor am i sure that it produces results comparable to honest Log mode.

But for focus checking JPG shot in so called "raw" is good. It doesn't seem to apply any sharpness, so no additional artifacts are there to confuse you.

I think you've pretty much nailed it. I use "Natural" simply because I haven't developed the skills yet to shoot in "RAW" with video and produce good results. I'm still learning Apple's Final Cut Pro X 10.4.2

DNG (digital negative) was invented by Adobe for still photographers in an attempt to cajole the still camera makers away from their proprietary RAW file formats. Very few took the bait. DNG has its advantages and disadvantages like most things.

I stepped away further from the mainstream by shooting with Fuji cameras that don't use Bayer sensor layouts. Fuji invented their own "X-Trans" series of sensors (with Sony making them) which I personally like and can get great results from.

I've just started shooting video with my Fuji cameras and they now have their own F-Log recording and can apply the Fuji "Eterna" film emulation to it which I find quite appealing.
 
That's a good looking video!!! Smooth and well paced. Nice choice of music too.

I tried all the options for video as I'm a noob when it comes to video. I pretty much use "Natural" as well. I'm just learning Apple's Final Cut Pro X 10.4.2. Coming from a background in photography video is a whole new world for me. Dazzling and overwhelming at the same time.
Thanks!
I have to work pretty hard in post to get "raw" video files to look as good as "natural".
 
Slightly off topic, but still. When at first i was unable to properly align and focus the pixAero 6mm i made an emotional purchase and ordered the Peau 8.33. Yesterday i installed it. To my surprise it didn't need the sticky-tape trickery. And while it also has some extreme-edge softness, the detail level on this thing is amazing and puts the pixAero 6mm standing ashamed in the corner.
 
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