WiFi upgrade beware

[jbrunel]

If you find my response to be HURTFUL, you are frankly not prepared to be on the internet. Sorry but that is just laughable at this point. And your presumption about people being angry about the price is non sense. You made that up.

I have just the form for that

 

[Pedals2Paddles]

I should probably have that form pre filled with my name in section 2E linked in my signature for easy access.

 

[Maxheadspace]

Which is why I specifically stated that I can't say if the correlation is causation. You can't ignore the correlation though, which is why I'm posting about it share the correlation. If enough of us have the same correlation, it because a candidate for a theory. So on and so forth.

I think what P2P was saying at the beginning, and what I'm gleaning from your original post, was that it doesn't necessarily sound like just loss of wifi signal. If you lost wifi signal the Solo should RTH. If it doesn't RTH, that's a different failure, maybe GPS, maybe not. To have two separate failures at the same time sounds unusual.

I suspect if you download your logs and take a look with Mission Planner the problem will jump out at you. I once had a DIY quadcopter with a Pixhawk FC start doing the boogaloo (that's a technical term) in the air, then diving for the ground, only to take off again before crashing. Managed to land it, but couldn't for the life of me figure it out. As soon as I looked at the logs it was plain as day, a brownout from a defective battery. Replaced with another battery and all was well. Mission Planner is a great tool. I've never used it with any of my Solos, but someone posted instructions on this site a couple years ago that look accurate: How To: Reading Solo Logs

The "auto analysis" feature is great.

Good luck!

Max

P.S., dataflash logs will give you better info than the telemetry logs. There's many vids on YouTube.

 

[Greg-J]

I don't know what happened to this thread, but y'all have way too much time on your hands.

In all seriousness though, I really appreciate everyone's insight and replies.

I flew probably 15-20 times from my front yard before I had a loss of gps as well as a loss of signal from the controller from about 40 feet away. My Solo drifted away over my house and I thought I had lost it. It auto landed on low battery on the lawn of the church behind my house. I was lucky. I sent in the logs to 3DR, and found out a lot about my neighborhood. I have a underground electrical transformer in the street right in front of my house, as well as a whole lot of wifi signals. I have not flown from my front yard since. Neighborhood conditions change daily, and the conditions you successfully fly in today, may not be the same tomorrow. That is the reason wide open areas are the places that are recommended to fly in. Especially while learning.

This is the first reply that resonates with my experience. In front of my house, directly in my flight path, is one of those large green power boxes.

I took it to Santa Cruz last week and did about 45 minutes of flying with no issues. Since I didn't have a gimbal, I used my hero 5 with the standard mount and used 1080p with stabilization on. The video isn't worthless, but it did make me miss my gimbal. As a side note, I had no idea how much juice the gimbal uses. I normally get about 9 minutes with my hero 4 black + gimbal. I doubled that without the gimbal using the hero 5.

With how cheap the Solo+gimbal bundle is right now combined with the fact that 3DR has failed to respond to my support request with anything more than their "Our support times are bad, we're trying to fix that, please be patient" email in over 3 weeks, I decided just to buy another bundle for the gimbal, battery, props, charger, and replacement parts should I need them. Honestly, if you have $300 I'd strongly recommend it.

 

[andrew.baker.142]

A 9 minute flight with gimbal and GPH4 is not good unless you are purposely landing with lots of battery left (which I do frequently)
Part of the improvement in flight times without the gimbal is the weight savings of the gimbal itself, not the measly amount of power it consumes.

 

[Greg-J]

I try to land with between 20%-30% battery left. I don't know what the power draw from the gimbal is vs. increased power draw for the additional weight. I just know that I was pretty shocked at the difference in flight times.