I flew my 2-month-old H on a CCC route in both directions yesterday morning. That went fine until it was time to land from 250 feet up. Pulling full aft on the left stick did pretty much nothing except intermittently drop a few feet at a time and then hover. I finally switched to RTH to get it to descend. When I took over manual control in angle mode at 10-15 feet up, it seemed to respond to back pressure on the left stick. But it also refused to yaw left or right with sideways movement of that stick.
Back home, I did a joystick calibration. As it often does, J2 (yaw) was centering at abut -15% on the Hardware Monitor rather than center scale. It looked okay after calibration, so I head for an open park field for a test flight.
The first flight there revealed in less than two minutes that it was still going to ignore yaw commands. I landed, powered off the aircraft, then did another joystick calibration on the ST-16. After rebooting everything, I took off again. The same problems were evident: only intermittent yawing. And often, leftward movement of the left joystick produced more of a rise in altitude than a yaw to the left. At about 3 minutes into the test, while holding left on the left joystick, the motors all quit and the aircraft freefell about 60 feet to the dirt near second base of the ballfield. The gear was down, but that didn't save the camera from impact and separation, nor did the gear itself survive. Lots of bent and broken pieces flew everywhere.
CH0 (throttle) of telemetry shows 3-seconds of 0 for motor start, as expected. But it also shows 3 seconds of 0 for motor stop near the end, as if I had depressed and held B3, the motor start/stop button. I hadn't. Oddly, CH0 showed 0 at a handful of other places in the telemetry file, mostly at places where left movement was applied to the left joystick. But these other 0 entries for CH0 were always less than the 3 seconds of duration required to stop the motors.
I sent the telemetry file for this flight and all the others made with my H (including a few that evidently took place near Shaghai) to Yuneec last night. We'll see what they say. In the meantime, I've uploaded them here in case anyone wants to play NTSB investigator and offer an opinion as to what happened.
I replaced the divot at second base, so no harm done there. It could have been worse at one of my frequent flight locations: over water, which is why I made the move to the H from my Typhoon 4K quad.
View media item 682
--Doug
Back home, I did a joystick calibration. As it often does, J2 (yaw) was centering at abut -15% on the Hardware Monitor rather than center scale. It looked okay after calibration, so I head for an open park field for a test flight.
The first flight there revealed in less than two minutes that it was still going to ignore yaw commands. I landed, powered off the aircraft, then did another joystick calibration on the ST-16. After rebooting everything, I took off again. The same problems were evident: only intermittent yawing. And often, leftward movement of the left joystick produced more of a rise in altitude than a yaw to the left. At about 3 minutes into the test, while holding left on the left joystick, the motors all quit and the aircraft freefell about 60 feet to the dirt near second base of the ballfield. The gear was down, but that didn't save the camera from impact and separation, nor did the gear itself survive. Lots of bent and broken pieces flew everywhere.
CH0 (throttle) of telemetry shows 3-seconds of 0 for motor start, as expected. But it also shows 3 seconds of 0 for motor stop near the end, as if I had depressed and held B3, the motor start/stop button. I hadn't. Oddly, CH0 showed 0 at a handful of other places in the telemetry file, mostly at places where left movement was applied to the left joystick. But these other 0 entries for CH0 were always less than the 3 seconds of duration required to stop the motors.
I sent the telemetry file for this flight and all the others made with my H (including a few that evidently took place near Shaghai) to Yuneec last night. We'll see what they say. In the meantime, I've uploaded them here in case anyone wants to play NTSB investigator and offer an opinion as to what happened.
I replaced the divot at second base, so no harm done there. It could have been worse at one of my frequent flight locations: over water, which is why I made the move to the H from my Typhoon 4K quad.
View media item 682
--Doug