3DR Solo Crash

[sdharris]

3DR said they will be providing me with an RMA # in 1-2 business days in order to provide a replacement Solo. I received their response over the weekend which was unexpected and very welcomed.

Well that is a positive response from them. Its a scary issue though as their controller does not appear to be filtering out bad data and acting on it. This is the first 3DR device I have considered having had DJI Phantoms 1 through 3 and not aware of the controller in the SOLO. Has it never been used before so real bleeding edge rather than evolved over time?

 

[ZippyThePinhead]

Just a question
Did you calibrate the compass around this area?, It looked like a GPS signal issue for sure.. it was hovering fine and then it decided it didn't like the weather and flew inside..
Please keep us up to date on 3drobotics findings.
Sorry
I will have mine on Monday so maybe you won't be alone... thanks for sharing this info..

Nope, I did not calibrate the compass. FWIW, this was the 2nd flight in a row, as I had just finished playing around with the Selfie cam. Here is video from just before the crash.

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It has been 4 days since I filed ticket with 3DR. I have not heard anything back from them. I called them yesterday and was on hold for 20 minutes before their phone system told me they were too busy to take my call and hung up on me.

 

[Dirby]

Nope, I did not calibrate the compass. FWIW, this was the 2nd flight in a row, as I had just finished playing around with the Selfie cam. Here is video from just before the crash.

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It has been 4 days since I filed ticket with 3DR. I have not heard anything back from them. I called them yesterday and was on hold for 20 minutes before their phone system told me they were too busy to take my call and hung up on me.

call them back.

 

[Raybro]

Good afternoon everybody. I hope I am posting this correctly. I apologize if I am not. This is an update to my Solo crash. I have been contacted by 3DR who reviewed the flight logs. They showed no issues or relevant data in the first two flights at the location of the crash. Then on the third flight, the Solo began to lose GPS position which caused the Solo to assume his right position in another random place. They recommend that I do not fly near urban environments which can cause blockage and to fly it in open fields as GPS multi-path issues could happen, to which they said they are currently working on that issue right now.

3DR said they will be providing me with an RMA # in 1-2 business days in order to provide a replacement Solo. I received their response over the weekend which was unexpected and very welcomed.

Glad to here that! Good luck and Happy Flying!

 

[thefrog]

After watching a video by ATx RC Productions who encouraged Solo users to post their eperiences with the Solo, I thought I'd go ahead and share my experience. I recieved the Solo today and after unboxing it and going through the preflight check list I flew it for a minute in my back yard and landed it manually. I then changed the speeds to Medium and rebooted everything after connecting my GoPro

I then went to the front street for another flight. I was happy with how the Solo was handling especially on its descent. I landed the solo, then took it back up and landed it again. I then raised it about ten feet off the ground and was practicing panning. I was slowly flying the solo back towards me (at about ten feet off the ground) and as it was on it's way towards me, it started to make movements not true to my input. So I immediately let go of the joysticks. The Solo kept on moving towards me and then started to veer in the direction of a neighbors house. I immediately started tapping the Pause button, but the Solo coninued to veer clockwise as it was flying forward. The veering stopped but it continued to fly towards a house. I retook the controls which did nothing to the Solo flight pattern and I just watched as it continued towards a house and finally hit a wall. Every propeller snapped apart. The battery flew out of place. A leg broke. Two LED covers snapped off and the main body was scuffed and slightly bent around the battery area as the battery does not fit snug any longer. The battery level was still above the halfway mark after the incident.

I have experience with the DJI platform using Lightbridge and flyng for commercial filming here in LA. I've gone through the scenario and can find no error, not even hypothetically on my part. It's as if the Solo suddenly lost connection with the controller, however I saw no error messages or freezing and it took on a mind of its own to hone in on a neighbors house.

I have confidence this is an issue that can be addressed and fixed but I will be very hesitant when flying another Solo. I spoke to 3DR customer support. I was transfered a few times to start a problem ticket and I sent in a flight log via the app. We'll see how 3DR handles this situation.

Curious about what was the height of the buildings just around the place you was flying? Usually the GPS error caused by the multipath reflection is in the range of 10-30ft in most cases with buildings up to 100ft tall. On another note, yesterday I have 10 sats for like 15 minutes and no GPS lock on open flat space. Never happened before, finally after 15 minutes got the lock and could fly.

 

[Koz]

They recommend that I do not fly near urban environments which can cause blockage and to fly it in open fields as GPS multi-path issues could happen, to which they said they are currently working on that issue right now..

That's simply unacceptable. It's not like this pilot was trying to fly down alley ways in NYC. There was a house and a few trees in the area. The general purpose of these types of aircraft is to take stunning photos and video and you won't get much of that flying in an open field.

They say that they are working on the issue, but I doubt firmware updates are the answer. About the only thing you can do with the firmware for this situation is to automatically tell the aircraft to stop and hover if the GPS coordinates change by a range of X within a certain time period. So you'll be flying and your aircraft will come to a sudden stop every now and then and try to re-engage satellites to determine where it is. That's not a fix - that's a patch.

I've said this before and I'll say it again - from everything I have read there are quality control and hardware issues with the Solo. I think that within the next few production runs there will be major internal component changes to the Solo. But what happens to the early adopters? Does 3DR do a recall or do current users have to put up with an inferior aircraft?

On paper, I love the Solo and it was my plan to add one to go along with my P2V+. But there is absolutely no way I would spend $2k on a Solo setup with the way things have unfolded. Unfortunately, I think users are in for another batch of problems once the gimbal rolls out.

I'm rooting for 3DR and the Solo, but I think they have dug themselves a pretty deep hole at this point. While we have seen other manufacturers have issues with similar products unless we're talking a cheapie knock off I have not seen as many critical issues as I have seen with the Solo (not even the Inspire!). I hope that 3DR gets it right, but they sure seem to have a long way to go.

 

[rrmccabe]

That's simply unacceptable..

Thats what I thought when I first read it too. But what they are saying is be careful flying it until they get the update out.

What other acceptable options are there?

 

[scoobyfan]

I was lucky enough to find a Solo in stock at a Best Buy last week and I purchased it. Unfortunately it was plagued with the same issues that others have been discussing here. Twice while in flight it lost GPS lock and veered off in a random direction at an extreme rate of speed. Nothing I did (stick input, pause button) had any effect on the Solo. In both instances, I was in a wide open area with no nearby obstructions that could explain GPS interference. During these events, the controller still showed 9+ satellites and no 'GPS Lost' error was shown on the screen like the manual states would be shown during a loss of GPS signal.

In addition to in-flight GPS loss, my Solo suffered from another strange bug. Around 50% of the time I would turn it on in preparation for flight, it would sit at 0 satellite lock for long periods of time (10+ minutes). If I turned the Solo off and then back on, it would instantly grab 8 or 9 satellites and give me the ok for flight. When I would hold the Fly button to begin spinning the props it would instead take off and instantly flip over and crash. After having this happen twice, I recognized the 0 satellite lock as the warning sign and instead of simply restarting the Solo, I would run through the level calibration procedure. After doing this, the controller would display a 'Calibration Error' message and ask me to restart the Solo. After restarting, it would then take-off and hover as expected.

Since I purchased it at Best Buy, I decided to take advantage of their 15 day return window. Amazingly one showed up in stock yesterday morning and I rushed over and exchanged my defective unit. I flew my replacement unit for around an hour yesterday afternoon and didn't have any of the issues that I'd had with my previous Solo.

 

[Koz]

What other acceptable options are there?

That's what I'm getting at. What are the options? I think for some of these issues a firmware update is a band-aid and not a fix. I could be wrong, but as someone who writes software (and apps) for a living I'm leaning towards hardware/quality issues - unless they have some really, really bad coders.

Does 3DR have similar issues with their other aircraft? I don't know because I haven't researched it yet. But getting geolocation data should essentially be the same for any platform.

I think the question is finding out whether the hardware is causing the signal loss or if they didn't anticipate certain things happening and they don't have the proper error subroutines in their code to handle those situations.

 

[rrmccabe]

I don't know either but would be surprised if this GPS unit is not used in other platforms.

But, its about all they could do at this point

 

[thefrog]

I was lucky enough to find a Solo in stock at a Best Buy last week and I purchased it. Unfortunately it was plagued with the same issues that others have been discussing here. Twice while in flight it lost GPS lock and veered off in a random direction at an extreme rate of speed. Nothing I did (stick input, pause button) had any effect on the Solo. In both instances, I was in a wide open area with no nearby obstructions that could explain GPS interference. During these events, the controller still showed 9+ satellites and no 'GPS Lost' error was shown on the screen like the manual states would be shown during a loss of GPS signal.

In addition to in-flight GPS loss, my Solo suffered from another strange bug. Around 50% of the time I would turn it on in preparation for flight, it would sit at 0 satellite lock for long periods of time (10+ minutes). If I turned the Solo off and then back on, it would instantly grab 8 or 9 satellites and give me the ok for flight. When I would hold the Fly button to begin spinning the props it would instead take off and instantly flip over and crash. After having this happen twice, I recognized the 0 satellite lock as the warning sign and instead of simply restarting the Solo, I would run through the level calibration procedure. After doing this, the controller would display a 'Calibration Error' message and ask me to restart the Solo. After restarting, it would then take-off and hover as expected.

Since I purchased it at Best Buy, I decided to take advantage of their 15 day return window. Amazingly one showed up in stock yesterday morning and I rushed over and exchanged my defective unit. I flew my replacement unit for around an hour yesterday afternoon and didn't have any of the issues that I'd had with my previous Solo.

I was suspecting some kind of local GPS interference coming from GoPro but further simple tests shows it is actually SOLO itself causing the problems. Just over the weekend I was waiting endlessly to get GPS while I have 10 satellites (!). I have even turned GoPro completely off, but it still took about 15 minutes on plain open suburban area while reporting 10 satellites all the time. Simple test shows when I place Galaxy S6 egde with GPS+ test app close to the SOLO's belly, all satellites signal level drops to about half, and most of them gone completely after few seconds. This made me curious even more what is going inside - upon opening of SOLO I can see large GPS patch antenna with large PCB ground plane and uBLOX NEO-7 GPS module and surprisingly, also large black plastic coated copper foil patch on the bottom side below the GPS board, apparently as an improvised shielding attempt. I would say my SOLO is going back to BB until this issue will be fixed. I don't have balls for other ways like reporting an issue and sending it back to 3DR for repair or waiting for some pseudo firmware fix of apparent hardware design flaw, which could probably take ages. Mainly it would be very hard to dispute this with 3DR support, as most of the time SOLO performs OK.

 

[Ramon Garcia]

Curious about what was the height of the buildings just around the place you was flying? Usually the GPS error caused by the multipath reflection is in the range of 10-30ft in most cases with buildings up to 100ft tall. On another note, yesterday I have 10 sats for like 15 minutes and no GPS lock on open flat space. Never happened before, finally after 15 minutes got the lock and could fly.

Hi Frog,

To answer your quest=

Curious about what was the height of the buildings just around the place you was flying? Usually the GPS error caused by the multipath reflection is in the range of 10-30ft in most cases with buildings up to 100ft tall. On another note, yesterday I have 10 sats for like 15 minutes and no GPS lock on open flat space. Never happened before, finally after 15 minutes got the lock and could fly.

Hi Frog,

All homes in the area are one story. Nothing above 25 feet.