Crashed my Solo. Could someone please help reading the logs?

[nwsisu]

I received my Best Buy Refurbished Solo yesterday. It has the Rev. B GPS board. I added the cardboard mod.
It seems to pick up satellites ok, but seems to intermittently loose them.
This morning I tried to fly it in the back yard. I brought it up maybe 10 feet had it loiter, and moved it around a little bit.
After a few minutes of flight, it suddenly took off and crashed in my kids playhouse, ruining all 4 propellers.
I am trying to look at the logs, but it's all new to me. Could someone help me out, taking a quick look at the logs, see what happened?

Thanks!

Log:
Amazon Drive

Bin:
Amazon Drive

Edit: I also posted this on a 3DR Solo Facebook page, and the response was that satellites dropped to 4, thus losing gps, and crashing before it had a chance to go in manual mode, or recover.

 

[jimloss]

I'm only 6 weeks into my time with my Solo so I don't have the experience that most on this forum have, but here's a graph of the satellites that your Solo had a view of in green and the Solo's speed in red:

Just as the number of sats dropped below 6 the speed increased. It does show the number of satellites in view did drop to 4.

The telemetry log could be used to show on a satellite view of your yard the orientation of the Solo, the direction of movement, the speed, and the number of satellites in view at each second. The telemetry log can be found on your controller (solo.tlog, solo.tlog.1, solo.tlog.2...).

 

[nwsisu]

Thanks! I will try find the telemetry later when I get home.

 

[nwsisu]

I don't know why, but when I download this specific log, it doesn't create any telemetry file (.tlog). Other logs I download do seem to create the tlog file

 

[jimloss]

I don't know why, but when I download this specific log, it doesn't create any telemetry file (.tlog). Other logs I download do seem to create the tlog file

Your last ten logs should be there (the Solex app can store more than ten and logs can be available there as well). You'll have to rename the oldest 9 to view them. As example, solo.tlog.1 gets renamed to solo1.tlog.

 

[nwsisu]

I accessed the controller with WinSCP and retrieved all the logs for that day. There are .log and .bin files for that particular session, but no .tlog

 

[nwsisu]

I have been flying in the front yard, which is much more open. 9-12 sats, no drops so far. So I think the back yard was too restrictive for satellites.

 

[pyrate]

back yards are terrible places to test
but you went into alt hold at the end there, meaning it lost lock most likely, in alt hold it will drift with wind or momentum you would have had to take over and use sticks to hold position

 

[jimloss]

I have been flying in the front yard, which is much more open. 9-12 sats, no drops so far. So I think the back yard was too restrictive for satellites.

My Solo is my second drone with GPS. The number of satellites that is even possible for the drone to see varies from day to day and throughout the day. As I'm typing this message there are only 14 sats possible for a drone to see, and that's only once above buildings and the trees. From the ground it'll never see as many. Throw in a few close trees or buildings and that's when you get into the dangerously low numbers.

Make sure that you are looking in the log folder on the correct device for the tlogs. I believe the bin files are on the drone, not the controller. The drone uses IP 10.1.1.10. The controller uses 10.1.1.1.

 

[nwsisu]

Your last ten logs should be there (the Solex app can store more than ten and logs can be available there as well). You'll have to rename the oldest 9 to view them. As example, solo.tlog.1 gets renamed to solo1.tlog.

I haven't tried that yet. I will give it a try later today.

 

[nwsisu]

back yards are terrible places to test
but you went into alt hold at the end there, meaning it lost lock most likely, in alt hold it will drift with wind or momentum you would have had to take over and use sticks to hold position

Small yard, house in front, trees in the back, and a large 5th wheel on the side, I should have known better. Didn't realize the drone was that sensitive. The front yard is wide open, and i seem to have good satellite reception there.

 

[nwsisu]

My Solo is my second drone with GPS. The number of satellites that is even possible for the drone to see varies from day to day and throughout the day. As I'm typing this message there are only 14 sats possible for a drone to see, and that's only once above buildings and the trees. From the ground it'll never see as many. Throw in a few close trees or buildings and that's when you get into the dangerously low numbers.

Make sure that you are looking in the log folder on the correct device for the tlogs. I believe the bin files are on the drone, not the controller. The drone uses IP 10.1.1.10. The controller uses 10.1.1.1.

Yeah, I'm learning more and more each day: ). I have now accessed both the controller and the drone, and retrieved log and bin files. But there was no tlog file for that accident flight.

 

[VCD]

you were in althold mode (not GPS assisted, and break (you pressed pause ?) were denied.
it's not really that "it" flew away , more like you did not fly it when it was needed.

 

[nwsisu]

you were in althold mode (not GPS assisted, and break (you pressed pause ?) were denied.
it's not really that "it" flew away , more like you did not fly it when it was needed.
View attachment 6058

Thanks. It's been a number of days, so starting to forget the details. I was originally flying on GPS, and everything happened so fast. So my current understanding of the event is that I lost gps, the drone switched to manual (with alt hold), and took off sideways, maybe by the wind (or by momentum from bad GPS reading?). Pressing pause did of course not help, I should have used the manual controls. The accident was in my opinion due to a bad environment to fly in, in the first place, and my inexperience flying the drone.
Since then, I have been flying in wide open areas, and the drone flies great. So yeah, it was all user error, which is better than having a faulty drone .

 

[VCD]

That's a very good conclusion. when you are at a place with large area, learn to fly in stabilize, nose in an all. Once you can fly that, you'll be recover just fine from any situation.