Welcome Inspire Pilots!
Join our free DJI Inspire community today!
Sign up

What did I do wrong?

Next time you fly multiple batteries or fly, land and attempt to fly again, check your MOD settings before you take off again. It's obvious there was a GPS issue and you were lucky that even though you weren't able to go into ATTI mode, you I1 was able to land safely. A very luck day for you!!
 
Ok. ...what is a pk index? I only know it as a primal key index used in programming and something spirit hunters refer to. Was my aircraft posessed?
Actually, I recalibrated the IMU inside on a dead level hard surface. Checked it across the motors with a level. Not sure how to calibrate sticks, found the mode in the app, sticks seem to be 100%. I'll look it up. Revised the checklist to include 10 new things (listed above). Should I think about trying again (after I calibrate the sticks)?
 
hey andy. glad you skated on this fly away. I read your story and all the little details you put in there so this will not repeat what you or anyone else said.

3 things. the compass heading indicator, shows the front of the aircraft and the camera direction in the lower left on the app. people have reported this being reversed on a power up and sometime after takeoff the aircraft grows a mind of its own and just flys away, usually crashes bad. what is happening is the compass heading has reversed 180 degrees(reasons unknown) and does the opposite of what you tell it to do. it's a very easy thing to miss and I personally never gave it a second thought till I read a few people had proof of this happening, now I check it every time. so while your trying to tell it to fly back to you your actually telling it to go the opposite way, when the fly away occurred, did you try telling the aircraft to fly away from you or did you go full hands off and just watch it do it's own thing. also,

were you in function mode? that mode can be really confusing easily and in a panic situation most people will not be able to fly in any direction they want and that switch is so stupidly small its real easy to think your in atti mode when your really not.

3rd hypothesis. on the map screen you see 2 dots, red and green. I believe one is the return to home point and the second is you. sometimes these can appear WAY WAY off. they are suppose to reset when you arm the motors but I have seen many times they do not and can relocate on their own. sometimes they are miles away from your actual location, sometimes where it was last turned on and the points never reset.

the inspire is hard wired in the firmware to pretty much lock you out and fly to one of these home points when the battery voltage level gets too low. it's actually a really bad idea that has been causing more crashes then it's prevented. this sounds a lot like what happened to you if they were really far away then it would make sense it just fly off and landed at over 50% battery life, it would take a lot of time to fly 1/2 mile away on auto pilot.
 
Last edited:
I got really lucky on that one. I checked the flight log and the quad is facing the direction that I pointed it. It landed because of the critical battery. I'd post the flight log. ....but I don't know how.
 
The K-index, and by extension the Planetary K-index, are used to characterize the magnitude of geomagnetic storms. Kp is an excellent indicator of disturbances in the Earth's magnetic field and is used by SWPC to decide whether geomagnetic alerts and warnings need to be issued for users who are affected by these disturbances.

The principal users affected by geomagnetic storms are the electrical power grid, spacecraft operations, users of radio signals that reflect off of or pass through the ionosphere, and observers of the aurora.

The K-index quantifies disturbances in the horizontal component of earth's magnetic field with an integer in the range 0-9 with 1 being calm and 5 or more indicating a geomagnetic storm. It is derived from the maximum fluctuations of horizontal components observed on a magnetometer during a three-hour interval. The planetary 3-hour-range index Kp is the mean standardized K-index from 13 geomagnetic observatories between 44 degrees and 60 degrees northern or southern geomagnetic latitude. The label 'K' comes from the German word 'Kennziffer' meaning 'characteristic digit.' The K-index was introduced by Julius Bartels in 1938. SWPC has used the K-index since the forecast center began operations.

Check the website below to see what the levels were on the day you were flying, I know this week there was a day or two where there was some significant electromagnetic interference

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/planetary-k-index


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
Thanks Yardman for the information. The pk index at the time was 1 or a 2 at best. I downloaded an app called k index monitor. It seems to be in sync with the link that you posted. I think I'm going to try again today with the newly revised checklist and level IMU calibration.
 
hey andy. glad you skated on this fly away. I read your story and all the little details you put in there so this will not repeat what you or anyone else said.

3 things. the compass heading indicator, shows the front of the aircraft and the camera direction in the lower left on the app. people have reported this being reversed on a power up and sometime after takeoff the aircraft grows a mind of its own and just flys away, usually crashes bad. what is happening is the compass heading has reversed 180 degrees(reasons unknown) and does the opposite of what you tell it to do. it's a very easy thing to miss and I personally never gave it a second thought till I read a few people had proof of this happening, now I check it every time. so while your trying to tell it to fly back to you your actually telling it to go the opposite way, when the fly away occurred, did you try telling the aircraft to fly away from you or did you go full hands off and just watch it do it's own thing. also,

were you in function mode? that mode can be really confusing easily and in a panic situation most people will not be able to fly in any direction they want and that switch is so stupidly small its real easy to think your in atti mode when your really not.

3rd hypothesis. on the map screen you see 2 dots, red and green. I believe one is the return to home point and the second is you. sometimes these can appear WAY WAY off. they are suppose to reset when you arm the motors but I have seen many times they do not and can relocate on their own. sometimes they are miles away from your actual location, sometimes where it was last turned on and the points never reset.

the inspire is hard wired in the firmware to pretty much lock you out and fly to one of these home points when the battery voltage level gets too low. it's actually a really bad idea that has been causing more crashes then it's prevented. this sounds a lot like what happened to you if they were really far away then it would make sense it just fly off and landed at over 50% battery life, it would take a lot of time to fly 1/2 mile away on auto pilot.

Funny thing happened when I took her beck to the same sight. I noticed right away that the arrow was 180° out. The thing was facing in the opposite direction. I kept shutting everything down and restarting. No change. After 4 compass calibrations it was only about 10-15 degrees out. I took her for a low level flight and had no problems except for that darn breaking ESC. It was working properly. .. just kept trying to stop on a dime. I guess I'll get used to it. Next time I'll go a little higher. Is it somewhat normal that the compass seems off a few degrees?
 
Last edited:
I'm not quite sure if I'm answering your question, but a compass is almost always off a few degrees from true North, AndyH -- see the description of magnetic declination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_declination -- the compass points about 16 degrees East of True North in my part of the world.

Where were you when trying to do the calibrations? If you can post lat/long we can look it in Google Maps/Earth just to see if there is anything there likely to be causing a distortion of the Earth's magnetic field.

The other Andy.
 
The calibration was done at:
Latitude: 40.208459
Longitude: -74.907961
Pegasus RC Flying Club, right?
That makes your compass out by about 14 degrees,
To give you the true heading you should allow for compass deviation by adding 14 degrees to your magnetic heading.
 
Last edited:
Ok. ....I'm lost. How would I do that? Yes, please feel free to call me an idiot.
 
Ok. ....I'm lost. How would I do that? Yes, please feel free to call me an idiot.
Nothing you can do to correct it, just accept that there is a difference of roughly 14 degrees between true north and magnetic north.
Looking at the heading icon, 14 degrees would be almost undetectable, just slightly out of alignment..
 
Andy,

I always download a satellite image of the area I'm going to fly, I then point the bird in the direction of a land mark, building, road junction etc visually, if the bird is pointing the same direction on the map then I'm good to go.
Regards
Les
 
Andy,

I always download a satellite image of the area I'm going to fly, I then point the bird in the direction of a land mark, building, road junction etc visually, if the bird is pointing the same direction on the map then I'm good to go.
Regards
Les

That's exactly what I did.
Thanks for all of your help,
Andy
 
I finally screen recorded the flight log. I sped it up a lot, but you see the messages and flight path. Anything after 3:22 isn't me, it's complete loss of control. It even took a picture by itself.
 

Members online

Forum statistics

Threads
22,277
Messages
210,655
Members
34,329
Latest member
defenderschool