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Important FIRMWARE version B23 - List Known Issues Here

After updating your H did you have any problems?

  • Flies great. No problems

    Votes: 67 60.9%
  • Compass errors

    Votes: 28 25.5%
  • GPS errors

    Votes: 18 16.4%
  • Loss of control. H won't respond to controller

    Votes: 16 14.5%
  • H flew away and crashed

    Votes: 13 11.8%

  • Total voters
    110
  • Poll closed .
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I received a new TH that was a replacement for one flew it self into a hill that was in its way when the TH stopped responding to the controller. That was version B22 of the firmware. That was after 6 flights.

The new one arrived pre installed with B23 and it has triggered compass errors when ever I moved it (no motors on and no blades just me picking it up). Yuneec said to go and fly it anyways. I flew one battery with no warnings while inflight, but warnings for compass only when on the ground, went home to charge up the next battery and 4 hours later went out to fly. The TH did not even get off the ground this time. Compass and GPS systems indicated a failure. There was so many warnings on the screen you could not get a chance to press the calibrate button.

A restart of the TH make the errors go away for about a few mim then they kick into overdrive again.

The Obstacle avoidable despite being OFF, triggered warnings also, and displays the range finder. It will randomly put up a OA not Available message when in my first flight. the OA wasn't actually working. Like some people have posted in you tube video's it would detect a solid wall, stop then fly towards it when I tested it on my first flight this was at full speed with OA on. When OA was on, and I flew slow, it also do the same thing. There was no logic to how it worked. I didn't have much time try much else as the battery only lasts 15 min on the Realsense version I guess.

When I tried the POI mode, it would not engage in that either. It started the motion, would travel for about 2 seconds in the circle, and the stop but the controller appeared to think it was still flying.

The night before the "Flight Mode" app stopped responding and is restarting message came up, I was not flying, I was just browsing the settings whole connected to the TH to confirm firmware and other settings.

I have been on the phone off and on for hours today with Yuneec, and they insist this issue is not common. They are going to replace it again they said. They told me at one point this morning that the compass error was triggered by the sensor on the motor because there was no blade installed, and once the blades are installed it will work fine. (there is no such sensor in case you were wowed by this detail!).

Despite a significant number of people reporting no issues, there is for sure a batch of these that have problems. As some have noted here I have done the Calibrations for Compass - this was INSISTED by Yuneec to before a flight.

I can't get enough time in the air with this to even start trying to understand what is going on with it. Hopefully others can contribute to the answer as they seem to be able to get further with the ones they own.

I am so disappointed and infuriated with this situation.

This new unit may be a completely messed up unit and maybe the B23 makes it worse. I figured a factory load of B23 should be good. no matter the cause, this very concerning to me.


I sent them an archive with 20 telemetry files all showing compass errors and their response was that they see no errors or flight problems in my telemetry files.

This is EXTREMELY not cool
 
Drone Video, I believe you because no one can make up a story like that. You're apparently in Western Canada, right?
No doubt your post will unleash a storm of helpful comments and things to try, but I say turn it back to Yuneec.
Good luck...
 
Drone Video, I believe you because no one can make up a story like that. You're apparently in Western Canada, right?
No doubt your post will unleash a storm of helpful comments and things to try, but I say turn it back to Yuneec.
Good luck...

Thanks for the feedback

The drone is already at UPS. I will admit that from my last call support to getting the drone back to the UPS drop off point closest to me was about 45 min. In that 45 min they sent the RMA, sent the pre paid shipping label while I was driving home from my flying location. Printed the form from my driveway with AirPrint, stick the drone into the box it came in 12 hours hours ago, drove to the UPS store 20 min away, they scanned in the package, and 6 min later a new email saying they shipped out the replacement already.

That is fast service.... but I guess they have had practice.

I am in Western Canada, only a few hours by plane to California, and a knew a few pilots so maybe I will bum a ride from one of them (if the weather is good, I hate small planes in the winter)...

There is for sure something wrong with some of these units. I had kept silent about my struggle since the 20th of August when my first one had its melt down as I wanted to give them the benefit of it being an isolated event.

I want to be a proud owner of the TH, I have been very excited to get it since my order back on Jan 9th, 2016 (and I'm sure some of you may have seen my post on different YouTube video's defending and promoting the TH). I'm am very troubled with what is happening with this model. I am hoping this is a software condition that a fix can be applied to for everyone to provide confidence in flight. My worst fear is its hardware with the integrated GPS unit. they should be extending warranty for everyone until we know the cause of the failure and why there is some perfect units and trouble maker units like mine has been.
 
I can't believe Yuneec and how they are handling this. Turning a blind eye to the problem is not going to make it go away and has for now turned me away from buying anything Yuneec again. I had one of the very first Q500's and have always supported the product line but if this is what we can expect out of this company for future products I for one am going to look elsewhere.
 
When I talked to them on the phone today, the CS (Mitch) acted like there was no problem at all. But offered to RMA it at their expense with NO prodding on my end.
There are too many experienced H owners, and drone pilots who are having errors.
Like all of you, I calibrated right after I did the firmware upgrade. I did it outside in the open facing North. Compass then accelerometer then gimbal. First flight - crash.
Recalibrated everything again, compass warning every time. Face North on power up no problems. Go figure that one out. I have not looked at the ST-16 logs yet, but I intend to DL them all before I send it back.

Back to the 2 week Yuneec again!
 
I can't believe Yuneec and how they are handling this. Turning a blind eye to the problem is not going to make it go away and has for now turned me away from buying anything Yuneec again. I had one of the very first Q500's and have always supported the product line but if this is what we can expect out of this company for future products I for one am going to look elsewhere.

I have a Q500+ also over a year now and not a single fault - it been banged up and parts replaced but it flies really well (minus the design flaw related to a a bit more aggressive wind)..... I was expected the same for the TH model from a company that is not new to this field, they had built several other good machines. They have a chance to fix it, but that window is small, they would be smart to make these problems go away as they are going to do great damage to the brand with a poor response.
 
When I talked to them on the phone today, the CS (Mitch) acted like there was no problem at all. But offered to RMA it at their expense with NO prodding on my end.
There are too many experienced H owners, and drone pilots who are having errors.
Like all of you, I calibrated right after I did the firmware upgrade. I did it outside in the open facing North. Compass then accelerometer then gimbal. First flight - crash.
Recalibrated everything again, compass warning every time. Face North on power up no problems. Go figure that one out. I have not looked at the ST-16 logs yet, but I intend to DL them all before I send it back.

Back to the 2 week Yuneec again!

I can confirm that everyone there is standing by the story of no extra calls or issues reported. I asked the question of 3 different people, and they all said all is fine, no issues past the one or two normal ones. Nothing specific about B23, Compass or GPS errors. Its very strange there is no elevated support calls... I work for a company that has about almost 70 billion in annual sales and EVERY time we put out new code, we have a spike in support calls. never been an exception in 20 years I have seen... always spikes.... and always a few quick fixes come out days and sometimes hours after public release....
 
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Since the update I have had two new issues, Drifting when trying to fly in a straight line.. Not using new trim button features

lading gear stuck in the up position needs RTH to force them down / yellow light alert when this happens while landing gear is going up. This happened twice and has hot happened since.
Hay Brian, quick question for you. Do you know how to activate the screenshot function?
 
Is it possible that the latest firmware update has made the compass more sensitive to local magnetic anomalies? If you are getting compass errors, try moving to a different location. I'll be flying tomorrow with the update in a familiar location. Wish me luck.

I flew today at my favorite local site without any problems (other than user error). I recalibrated compass and gimbal. I tested the new "trim" feature and RTH flying forwards (finally!). Range was not as far as my previous flights but I wasn't as high either. At 3400 ft out, 400 ft up, I lost telemetry and video. RTH worked as expected. My user error was forgetting to raise the landing gear which, I think, prevented entering Task mode. I'm among the nearly 60% who are happy with the new firmware!
 
I have 2 TH's one with latest FW and one with previous version. I really like the added camera control feature. They both fly about the same, maybe the latest is a bit smoother but with wind at beach they seem about the same. Both stay on station very accurately in wind. Vids are nice but I believe focus could be better.
Really except for added controls I can not see much difference in the 2.
Tim
 
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I have 2 TH's one with latest FW and one with previous version. I really like the added camera control feature. They both fly about the same, maybe the latest is a bit smoother but with wind at beach they seem about the same. Both stay on station very accurately in wind. Vids are nice but I believe focus could be better.
Really except for added controls I can not see much difference in the 2.
Tim

Agreed. I felt the same after flying before and after update at the same location. By the way, why do you have 2 TH's?
 
So I am going to take the Crab out today to an area with a lot less electrical noise and do some testing for distance. Yesterday I tried to fly and was limited to a distance again of about 700' total (213m) until I turned to the right 90 degrees from the drone and it was on my left side. I was then able to take it out to about 1300' (396m) before losing signal and it started returning home. Also, and I do not know if this is a firmware issue or not but I needed to format one of my memory cards and I erased it in the ST16, now the card shows damaged and cannot be mounted or used so its dead. Just found that odd so soon to kill a memory card after formatting it. I'm trying not to be hyper sensitive to anything that goes wrong and blame the firmware update but I so want to blame the firmware, lol, kinda lol, not really lol...okay...lol.
 
You must Unmount an SD card before you eject it, otherwise it will show as damaged in other devices. If you didn't, put it back in the ST-16, go to Settings->Storage in PAD mode and scroll down. There's an Unmount button you can click.
 
First one crashed for no reason so while it was in hospital i bought a second one thinking they would need frequent trips back to hospital. So far that one incident was only issue except poor focus.
Tim
Agreed. I felt the same after flying before and after update at the same location. By the way, why do you have 2 TH's?
 
...Also, and I do not know if this is a firmware issue or not but I needed to format one of my memory cards and I erased it in the ST16, now the card shows damaged and cannot be mounted or used so its dead. Just found that odd so soon to kill a memory card after formatting ...

I'm my near a place I can give you the link to fix the memory card but it's not damaged beyond repair. The partion table is buggered. There is a few steps you can do inside windows to delete the bad partion and build a new one. It used command line and a clean command for the disk.

I'm out and about but I will find it and link it later today. This condition is caused by removal of the memory under certain conditions without ejecting it properly. In windows machines the default is to allo you to pull the memory without thought on Linux based machines such as Mac you have to eject it first. As a side note the windows default way slows down access but it's safe.

I have a Mac and made this mistake a few times so I use the fix often. Will send it as soon as I can find it.
 
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I'm my near a place I can give you the link to fix the memory card but it's not damaged beyond repair. The partion table is buggered. There is a few steps you can do inside windows to delete the bad partion and build a new one. It used command line and a clean command for the disk.

I'm out and about but I will find it and link it later today. This condition is caused by removal of the memory under certain conditions without ejecting it properly. In windows machines the default is to allo you to pull the memory without thought on Linux based machines such as Mac you have to eject it first. As a side note the windows default way slows down access but it's safe.

I have a Mac and made this mistake a few times so I use the fix often. Will send it as soon as I can find it.

A simple fix that often works is to put the card back into the machine that you took it from, and unmount it properly. That will usually fix the partition table.
 
Before I had to send my H back, I was able to get 3000 before things got dicey.
Video lag and some telemetry drop out.
I don't know how you youngins do it.
At 3000 all I could see is a black dot. If there had been darker sky's I would have lost it. Thank goodness for the strobes.
 
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You must Unmount an SD card before you eject it, otherwise it will show as damaged in other devices. If you didn't, put it back in the ST-16, go to Settings->Storage in PAD mode and scroll down. There's an Unmount button you can click.

Understood and tried but still came out damaged then I remembered I need to give ol DOS a shot on repairing the partition table as the controller still showed the card as damaged.

I know most here might be MAC users but I'm a M$ guys so here was my fix:

from windows 10 type CMD in the search area and right click the cmd icon and select 'Run as administrator'

type 'diskpart'

type 'list disk'

type 'select disk *'
* is your disk you are wanting to fix.
it will state Disk * is now the selected disk.

type 'clean'

type 'create partition primary'

type 'select partition 1'

type 'active'

type 'format fs=fat32'
you could add the switch /quick but I feel its best to just let format do a complete formatting of the memory

type 'assign letter=*'
* is whatever open disk letter you have

type 'exit' and the memory card should be working again, if not...its dead.

I should put this in a different area of the forums but I still think its because of the firmware :p
 
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