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Survived 2 Year Tree Hugging, Almost

Joined
Oct 5, 2014
Messages
171
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55
Location
Connecticut, USA
A friend of mine flew his Inspire 1 into a tree almost 2 years ago. Through multiple Connecticut winters and hot summers this bugger stood its ground (so to speak). The tree was too inaccessible to have any equipment reach it and too thin to scale so there it remained, kissing that tree so to speak. Suddenly we were hit with some unusual weather for CT (like tornados) and down she came. Fortunately it landed into some heavy marsh grass and it physically survived the tree departure. In fact, it is in remarkable condition physically. So I did a complete teardown, cleaned the tarnish on all the connectors, checked the motor bearings, greased the Landing Gear Center Section Component, and reassembled the unit. Sometime over the 2 years the camera fell off so I installed a good camera from my Inspire. Not knowing what to expect, I brought it outside, kept a fire extinguisher handy and fired it up. No surprise that it didn't start, yet encouraging that lights blinked, and the camera communicated an image. I then proceeded to update the firmware which it did successfully. Restarted it and still no joy. What I get is the message "Main Controller Data Error" and IMU Initialization Failed". No surprise. So I am guessing the Ncore module is partially fried. So getting to my question, before I spend any money on a new Ncore module, how can I verify other expensive items are OK. I really don't want to go down a rats nest on this little project. For instance, how can I test the landing gear motor. I can manually lower the gear, but is there a way to bench test the motor. I read the posts on bench testing the ESCs, but I am not sure if there has been any progress on that front. Any suggestion and help will be appreciated. By the way, it would be really cool to see this thing fly again!
 
It sounds like you have another inspire 1 that you can test it on. I would swap the main flight controller from your working inspire 1 and placed it on the non working inspire 1 and go from there. I have tried this with many of my drones and also did a tear down on my inspire before buying the parts that I need and have always worked for me. I hope this helps.
 
Thanks for your response. That is an option that I thought about also. My preference would be to not to tear down the running Inspire unless I have to. I just cannot believe there is no simple way to test out these components.
 

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