HELP!!! LOCKED OUT OF THE DRONE!!!

[Michael Gambrell]

Alright, here we go with as much information as I can give to hopefully fix what might be an easy issue...

BTW, I am certified CFR 14 Part 107 as of yesterday. GO ME...

Background: purchased used 3 days ago with no prior history.
Re-bound camera and drone to RC (just in case)... Updated firmware for app, controller, camera, and drone to all current builds (822 for hardware and 829 for app).
Fired her up and learned how to fly and got the hang of things pretty quickly. Flight logs looked cleaned until shutdown yesterday.

Last night: attempted to connect drone to QGroundControl last night (as posted in another thread) because I like the visual output of flight data and the person in the video raised a valid point concerning visual logs when having to defend yourself.
Installed QGC and in the middle of installation I was prompted to install PX4 drivers.
Was not able to connect - most likely due to an older laptop. Downloaded file for HGUI (NOT H+GUI) that included a driver for the COM port... Still no connectivity so I gave up for the evening.
HOWEVER, TO SHUT DOWN THE RC, I HAD TO PULL THE BATTERY. Pressing the power button for any length of time did nothing... thought nothing of this.

This evening: fired up the RC and drone and had only connectivity to the camera. No LED lights, no happy startup tune... only the indicator that the camera was online. Still had to remove the battery to power off

Uninstalled and reinstalled FM2.0, re-bound camera, but still no drone. It does not even appear in the saved bind options, which I would expect to be the case after a reinstall.

I am beginning to wonder is something got mixed in translation with the PX4 driver install... does QGC assume control for firmware updates to the chip? I am getting a message the COM connect cannot happen during firmware upgrade, but I never told QGC to upgrade.

Is there a hard reset for the drone?

 

[Fred Garvin]

So, you tried to install a completely different flight control software stack on the ST16S?

 

[Phaedrus]

I wish I could help. What I can say, is if you get it going again maybe wait a while before mucking around in the controller firmware. I suggest contacting Yuneec and seeing they can help you.

 

[RPR]

You are going to brick your drone and camera. Hint* the reboot is on the board, you have to take the top canopy for QG to boot and flash, but do not flash the FW you can unplug and plug the usb data cord, but it won’t do much, you have to do a hard boot.

I’ve set my RTH battery parameters, because YUNEEC set these parameters really low. I have found the curves parameters and I will tweak those in the weekend, when I have time, and I am also documenting all of the steps in video.

Again.. Do not flash the board, only use a build from Yuneec.

 

[Michael Gambrell]

First of all, thank you all for your responses thus far.

@Fred Garvin - The only thing that I installed was the QGC app on my laptop to interface with the drone directly regarding visual flight log data (there is a video elsewhere in this forum reposted by @Steve Carr). Within that install, there was an additional driver install package for the PX4 board which, I assume, was only for the laptop side of the interface. Never did I see any dialogue box stating that the board was to be updated or needed to be.

I did nothing with the RC/ST16S during all of this. I believe some sort of interaction between the laptop, QGC, and drone is the culprit.

I will be contacting Yuneec today as I need to determine what warranty, if any, exists and what my options are.