Had an experience the other day where the transmitter had a low battery alarm but was still on. (8FJ) My operator completely lost control of the gimbal and it started going NUTS! It spun around at full speed, and every axis was hitting the limits, bashing the camera a lot. I had him turn off the transmitter thinking failsafe would kick it into Lock mode (that is the way it's set) but t'was not the case. It had episodes of spinning that were easily 3-4 rotations per second. Quite scary. I waited till it settled down and landed in the grass. After charging the transmitter I had no problems with a whole day of shooting.
Yikes. It'd be interesting to hear from Freefly about what happens to the MōVI if it loses radio signal. I would hope in Airborne mode that it would lock the gimbal.
It was a fresh battery, and only the 2nd flight of the day. Steve, I'll try to get the config uploded. The only other factor was an antenna tower close to the shot, but since I had no problems with my copter Tx, also on 2.4 ghz I don't think it was that, especially since it coincided exactly with the low battery alarm on the tx.
Hi Tim: I would not be quite so quick to discount the antenna tower's influence -- it's really hard to know whether it was an issue or not as, when you get close to antenna, all bets are off regardless of what frequencies the antenna is transmitting on. If the 8FJ's batteries were getting low, it is entirely feasible that the "noise" from the antenna could have been a factor. But the only way to gather more data will be to fly where there are no antenna towers and let the battery on the 8FJ get low and see if you get another M5 freak-out, I suspect. Andy.
If you have a bench power supply, it should be pretty easy to reproduce the problem by lowering the voltage to the low end of the operational range of your transmitter, then carrying the MōVI around handheld and doing a range check. If you see the same kind of behavior, then that is indeed the issue. And you could start up a blow dryer or something else that'd make a lot of RF noise, too. Or you could let Freefly test it.
But in theory, if the rx is swamped with a rogue signal, shouldn't that send it into failsafe? Plus, I thought the Futaba FAAST system was bulletproof?
Hi Tim: Yeah, you hit the nail on the head: "But in theory..." Near antenna towers, all bets are off....I'm afraid. Theory gives way to voodoo... Andy.