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Controller control failure.

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Dec 1, 2018
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Greetings Fellow Pilots! I had an unsettling experience yesterday. I was flying my Breeze over a construction site in the controller mode. The Breeze was about 90 ft distance and about 85 ft altitude. Everything was working fine. I went into settings to change the camera exposure and closed settings. I still had a good video connection to my Android phone. Then I noticed I could not take a photo. I tried to reposition the drone. Then I realized it was not responding. It was holding a very stable position at the point I last had control. I tried several times to regain control but to no avail. At this point I simply did not know what I could do to regain control. I thought about powering down the controller to see if i could regain control with my Android phone. I noticed that I had the "return home button" on the phone screen so I tapped it. I'm happy to report the Breeze faithfully responded. It gained maximum altitude and returned home precisely where i had launched. This was a great relief because had I crash landed where the drone was flying at the time it would have been in a locked fenced in construction area. Now I'm trying to figure out why I lost control. I had freshly charged batteries on both the drone and the charger. I had powered up both the drone and the controller before calibrating the compass. I did notice after completing calibration the controller had powered down on its own. I found this odd because it should have been fully charged. I powered it back up and made a successful connection. I tested the drone with a series maneuvers before continuing the flight. Everything seemed fine. The drone was located within about 80 ft of "high voltage lines" when the failure occurred. Does anyone have advise as to what caused the failure? Is there a way to switch modes from the controller to the phone mid flight? Is there a way to test the voltage of the controller after charging?
 
Changing the camera settings while in Controller mode of operation can be done by tapping the Gear icon on the upper left corner of the screen.

When you exited to the Settings you exited the flight mode and broke the connection of the controller by exiting the Controller mode of flight. The Breeze responded as it was supposed to by hovering and waiting to regain connectivity, then executed an auto RTH. If you need to change anything in the Settings, you should land, make the changes, then resume flight.

The controller will power itself off if no control inputs are received for some specified length of time. I’m not sure what that is as I’ve never timed it. There have been some that found the controller battery to be bad right out of the box. The only way I know to test the charge on the internal battery is to open the back of the controller and use a multimeter to measure the voltage. At full charge it should be 4.2 VDC as it is a Li-ion battery. It should last up to 18 hours of use on a full charge (Power button solid blue).

Edit - I made a mistake on the battery. It is a 3.6V Li-ion and at full charge should read 4.2V. It previously said 3.6 V at full charge. Thanks @Pman!
 
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Changing the camera settings while in Controller mode of operation can be done by tapping the Gear icon on the upper left corner of the screen.

When you exited to the Settings you exited the flight mode and broke the connection of the controller by exiting the Controller mode of flight. The Breeze responded as it was supposed to by hovering and waiting to regain connectivity, then executed an auto RTH. If you need to change anything in the Settings, you should land, make the changes, then resume flight.

The controller will power itself off if no control inputs are received for some specified length of time. I’m not sure what that is as I’ve never timed it. There have been some that found the controller battery to be bad right out of the box. The only way I know to test the charge on the internal battery is to open the back of the controller and use a multimeter to measure the voltage. At full charge it should be 3.6VDC as it is a Li-ion battery. It should last up to 18 hours of use on a full charge (Power button solid blue).
Thanks for your reply. Okay, so if I understand correctly. Changing the camera settings requires landing the bird? Changing the camera settings was the last operation before the problem occurred so that must have been what caused the problem. I think I do remember reading that the control does power down if idle for a while, so that probably is what happened as well.
 
You do not have to exit the Controller flight mode to change camera settings! If you select the Gear icon in the upper left of the screen while in a flight mode it will access the camera settings for white balance, exposure, and flicker. If you need to change the video mode, photo size, or scene settings found in Camera Settings you should land, change, then resume flight.

When you exit the flight mode you are currently in while the Breeze is airborne you are severing direct control of the aircraft. That is not a good safety practice for a pilot in command!!!

Best practice is to set video and photo modes before takeoff in the Camera Settings menu. Once airborne use a patch of sky away from the sun to set and lock white balance, then aim the camera at the subject of interest to get the best exposure, then commence taking photos and/or video.

Hope this helps clear up this issue.

On another note, the Drone Settings should be set prior to takeoff to reflect the area the flight will take place in. For example RTH should be set high enough to clear the tallest obstacle in the flight area, but not so high that it wastes battery power to get to it.
 
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