Post by alvinoid on Dec 30, 2017 19:41:07 GMT
Hi All,
I posted on a previous thread regarding the issue where the radio controller would not pair/connect to the drone. This was intermittent with the controller and drone pairing 1 out of every 25 attempts. At times manipulating the switches on the upper left side of the controller (camera control switch) seemed to play a role with getting it to pair (and make the "happy" sound.
Note that I had hardly flown the drone, only one very short flight of about 7 minutes since it arrived from the Kickstarter campaign.
After some trial and error, and some troubleshooting, I determined it had to be a problem with the camera control switch. I opened up the radio controller (had to find the hidden screw under the decal in the battery compartment) and found numerous cold/very poor solder joints on the switch PC board, as expected. See the image below and if you zoom in, you'll clearly see the extremely poor quality soldering and raised contacts. Also, there was a ton of left over flux around the awful soldering.
We ended up re-flowing the solder points and this fixed the problem. The drone and controller pair/connect 100% of the time.
A few thoughts (Alex with Urbandrones hope you read these) -
I chose to dig into this because I have the technical background and the skill/tools to re-solder these parts and because I suspected that any dealings with the manufacturer would be slow and require a lengthy return of the gear, possibly even some more expense to 'fix' things. It seemed easier to do it myself and luckily the problem was blatantly obvious.
This was an easy fix, but again, shouldn't have been required for a new drone. I'm expecting there may be more issues with the drone that others have experienced. I have a splashdrone auto plus that seems pretty good, but I found similar bogus workmanship in that one too.
Anyhow, for any others that have these things, I'd recommend a good going-over, especially assembly and soldering quality, before any serious flying.
Will follow up with any further results once I'm flying again. Hoping to eventually get shots of Alvin on launch and then land to film it as it submerges. Too bad I have to rebuild the thing first.
I posted on a previous thread regarding the issue where the radio controller would not pair/connect to the drone. This was intermittent with the controller and drone pairing 1 out of every 25 attempts. At times manipulating the switches on the upper left side of the controller (camera control switch) seemed to play a role with getting it to pair (and make the "happy" sound.
Note that I had hardly flown the drone, only one very short flight of about 7 minutes since it arrived from the Kickstarter campaign.
After some trial and error, and some troubleshooting, I determined it had to be a problem with the camera control switch. I opened up the radio controller (had to find the hidden screw under the decal in the battery compartment) and found numerous cold/very poor solder joints on the switch PC board, as expected. See the image below and if you zoom in, you'll clearly see the extremely poor quality soldering and raised contacts. Also, there was a ton of left over flux around the awful soldering.
We ended up re-flowing the solder points and this fixed the problem. The drone and controller pair/connect 100% of the time.
A few thoughts (Alex with Urbandrones hope you read these) -
I chose to dig into this because I have the technical background and the skill/tools to re-solder these parts and because I suspected that any dealings with the manufacturer would be slow and require a lengthy return of the gear, possibly even some more expense to 'fix' things. It seemed easier to do it myself and luckily the problem was blatantly obvious.
This was an easy fix, but again, shouldn't have been required for a new drone. I'm expecting there may be more issues with the drone that others have experienced. I have a splashdrone auto plus that seems pretty good, but I found similar bogus workmanship in that one too.
Anyhow, for any others that have these things, I'd recommend a good going-over, especially assembly and soldering quality, before any serious flying.
Will follow up with any further results once I'm flying again. Hoping to eventually get shots of Alvin on launch and then land to film it as it submerges. Too bad I have to rebuild the thing first.