Hello Fellow Yuneec Pilot!
Join our free Yuneec community and remove this annoying banner!
Sign up

Don't try this at home!

Joined
Apr 9, 2018
Messages
10
Reaction score
2
Age
42
So, I bought a Breeze the other day, because I've been drone-curious for a while and thought it would be a relatively inexpensive way to crash and learn ;) To that end, I bought a couple extra batteries and props & have been flying it crash-free for a few days until....

Just after recording this:
... I got a little too fancy and took a wee dive into the water below :( Oh no!

Breeze was under 3-4 feet of water when I finally got down from that cliff a couple minutes later... quickly assessed the depth and current and jumped in fully clothed to retrieve it. Drone was still beeping and I pulled the lipo immediately and a couple minutes later had it cracked open and on the defroster in the truck for the half hour drive home.

Fully intent on disassembling it and putting it on rice for a day, I nevertheless failed to resist the urge to see if it still flew as it looked "pretty dry" when I got home - sooooo I popped in the battery... and it flew as if nothing had happened.

It's on rice now anyway for good measure. Just may have gotten lucky here ;) Perhaps I'll recover video of the crash and recovery if it's on the drone, we'll see!

Also... Hi, Steve! ;)
 
Last edited:
Welcome to YuneecPilots!!

That was some introduction you made!:eek:

That had to be one cold dip in the pool. Unbelievable the Breeze still flew after that. Definitely want to see the BreezeSub video.
 
It's on rice now anyway for good measure. Just may have gotten lucky here
Hi Alex,
Great to see you join us air heads on the forum. Maybe I'll finally have someone to fly with. :)
It survived the drowning because of the cold water. It's in the OEC manual.
Post some more video. You travel to some great spots and we would love to see it.

BTW, the warm air from a hair dryer works better than rice as long as you don't get it too hot. Don't ask why I know this.
 
  • Like
Reactions: alexyoung
BTW, the warm air from a hair dryer works better than rice as long as you don't get it too hot. Don't ask why I know this.

Anyone using a hair dryer will know that too hot a setting will cause (a) flyaway... at least if I remember back when I had enough hair to dry... ;)
 
I did end up using a hair dryer on low because there was some condensation going on in the camera, so I propped it up to blow into the airframe from underneath, it’s all cleared up and I flew two batteries through testing it, seems fine now.

Aaaand evidently I hadn’t started the camera when it went down, which is unfortunate because I bet the video would have been awesome - especially if it captured the expression on my face pulling it out of the drink.
 
I know that expression :eek:, it’s the same one I used to get scuba diving in the St, Clair river! Oohhh that water is sooooo ccccold:confused:.

Alex, are you another Yooper?
 
Not quite a Yooper yet, still a little bit further south of der, eh? I get around up there quite a bit though!

I have some ideas of places up there to fly a little this summer, but I’m probably going to need a bandolier of batteries!
 
  • Like
Reactions: Steve Carr
If you pass near Flint, MI on your way up (a northern suburb of Detroit, as everything south of Big Mac is Detroit) give me a shout. I’ll be in that area from the end if April until sometime in October.
 
alexyoung,

Sorry for the delay in welcoming you, been busy getting ready to head back to MI.

Welcome to the YuneecPilots community!

We are a group that shares our knowledge of the hobby/business and welcome pilots of all skill levels and backgrounds. Please read the Community Rules found at the bottom of the webpage, and make use of the Forum Search (it is restricted to this forum) for any question you have before posting. Chances are that the answer is waiting for your question. That being said, please join in and share your experiences with the community.

We appreciate when new members make use of the Introduction area of the forum to tell us a little about themselves and their interests in multirotor aircraft.
 
So, I bought a Breeze the other day, because I've been drone-curious for a while and thought it would be a relatively inexpensive way to crash and learn ;) To that end, I bought a couple extra batteries and props & have been flying it crash-free for a few days until....

Just after recording this:
... I got a little too fancy and took a wee dive into the water below :( Oh no!

Breeze was under 3-4 feet of water when I finally got down from that cliff a couple minutes later... quickly assessed the depth and current and jumped in fully clothed to retrieve it. Drone was still beeping and I pulled the lipo immediately and a couple minutes later had it cracked open and on the defroster in the truck for the half hour drive home.

Fully intent on disassembling it and putting it on rice for a day, I nevertheless failed to resist the urge to see if it still flew as it looked "pretty dry" when I got home - sooooo I popped in the battery... and it flew as if nothing had happened.

It's on rice now anyway for good measure. Just may have gotten lucky here ;) Perhaps I'll recover video of the crash and recovery if it's on the drone, we'll see!

Also... Hi, Steve! ;)

Awesome luck. Also, you and everyone else that thinks rice will do anything is crazy, it will not. If you left it a year it wouldn't do anything for the moisture. Quick fix, easy if you don't have a food dehydrator, heat oven to 200F, 10 mins.,TURN OFF, place drone, cell phone or ? on a cookie tray or similar, set into oven, close door and wait at least 2 hrs. If its going to work, it will then and there will be no trace of moisture.
For all of you armed and ready to say no way I am an electronic tech and have 40 years experience. This is the next best solution,
 
Don't try this at home??? Too late! Last September. Smacked into a power line I couldn't see because of the sun and then dropped into a pond like a lawn dart. My recovery efforts were comical and unsuccessful. Finally got it out about two weeks later. Dried it out for a week. Would not even turn on with a new battery. (It was a Q500, now its nothing.)
 
Awesome luck. Also, you and everyone else that thinks rice will do anything is crazy, it will not. If you left it a year it wouldn't do anything for the moisture. Quick fix, easy if you don't have a food dehydrator, heat oven to 200F, 10 mins.,TURN OFF, place drone, cell phone or ? on a cookie tray or similar, set into oven, close door and wait at least 2 hrs. If its going to work, it will then and there will be no trace of moisture.

I've dropped a lot of things in water and also own a food dehydrator and never thought of using it for that - not a bad idea!
 
Well, I may have spoken too soon, not sure if way delayed effects of the water landing were the culprit but have no other ideas here / I’ve flown it dozens of times since then, flew it this past weekend at Black River Harbor (Steve’s neighborhood) all over the place w no problems, flew twice yesterday in the woods near home up to geofence with no problems and flew low to ground practicing. This is just before it went awry:

tumblr_p7pu12tJ1F1xrpo08o1_1280.jpg



All the sudden mid flight after a half dozen takeoffs and landings with no warning it took off. Hit a tree, I retrieved it... replaced damaged props, recalibrated compass and it hovers for about 10 seconds and then takes off like a bat out of **** in a random direction. I took it apart last night looking for obvious problems and didn’t see anything, tried again just now after recalibrating again for good measure and this time it went up to probably 40’ on it’s own, hovered, flew aimlessly around a bit and then took off fast again.

All sensors looked good and good Gps - I checked before each flight / and I got no magnetic warnings - also breeze was totally unresponsive to controls including the kill switch.

After searching I found it about 200 yards away in the woods. Whatever’s wrong is above my pay grade but since I’m now invested in lots of extra batteries and spare parts I perhaps foolishly bought another breeze just now and am heading to pick it up.

Hopefully this one lasts longer! (Perhaps I should buy crash forgiveness on this one?)
 
Last edited:
I believe this log is from my last attempt. I intentionally used a partially depleted battery so if it did run again, it wouldn't run too far.

I've looked at this log and tried looking at DoomMeister's guide, without having any "good" logs saved to compare it to I'm not certain that I'd notice anything, I did export a KML from the log and looked on the map and the GPS coords look accurate to what I saw - although I notice I don't see any change in the motor status before it crashed, in the other logs where it crashed I saw that - the GPS coords in the last entry in this log are approximately where I found it beeping in the woods after it fell from treetop level.
 

Attachments

  • 2018_04_24_15_24_14.txt
    4.7 KB · Views: 7
Last edited:
Alex,

You were in flight mode 10 (pilot mode GPS off, according to Helmut Elsner's log2kml program).

When the Breeze first took flight (at voltage level of 41%) it appears to have flown to the southeast and losing altitude to almost 64 meters below starting point in about 9 seconds. There was an error flag immediately on takeoff.

Over the next 5 seconds it gained altitude from -64 meters to 1.5 meters (faster than the Breeze can phyically fly) still heading southeast. It gained an altitude of of 21 meters in the next 13 seconds, then lost altitude to about 5 meters in the next 12 seconds before climbing to 16 meters in the next 7 seconds (lowest voltage point was 25%)ending the log file.

My conclusion is that some sensor was out of whack at takeoff. With Yuneec not releasing any info it is hard to know which system went haywire. The sensors seeing the rapid descent to 64 meters below the takeoff point suggests you were on a fairly large hill and it was following the ground, then made a miraculous ascent for 5 seconds before flying off into the trees.
 
Thanks a ton - That’s basically what it looked like in the logs to me but I haven’t saved good logs so didn’t really know what I was looking at.

I was in pilot w GPS off because I wanted to see if bad GPS data was causing the issue - the only command I gave it was to take off - after that it did it’s own thing - there were no hills anywhere - totally flat ground - so this leads me to believe the altimeter (barometric?) is at least part of the cause - does that sound reasonable?

Breeze app didn’t report any errors and sensor indicators on top of app looked good. There is no way it descended below takeoff as it would have been underground ;) But using Helmut’s (awesome) program the horizontal gps track of the flight exported to KML looks accurate on Google Earth / clearly the altitude was way off though.

Well, second Breeze is in my hands now so I suppose it’s fair to say I’m having fun anyway
 

New Posts

Members online

Forum statistics

Threads
20,955
Messages
241,587
Members
27,284
Latest member
csandoval