Camera gimbal problem after problem with firmware update

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Hi everyone,

A novice here with a little Mavic Air experience and a past life in fixed wing and aerobatic helis

Sorry to introduce myself with a plea for help, but it appears I have got myself into a world of hurt here.

I bought a second hand P4 off a good mate. The full history of the drone is known and it has never had any issues. When I first got it, it wanted firmware updates for everything, so I did them. All good and I flew it just once just generally roaming around the place taking random videos with no issues.

There was a chance I might use it this weekend so last night I pulled it all out to go over it. I had also bought a new 64GB card for it and wanted to install that and check it. I fired it up and it wanted to do some updates, it wanted the controller one first and that was no problem.

Then it wanted to do the aircraft. Being a novice I let it the DJI Go 4 app on the iPad go ahead and do it. The aircraft rebooted a few times and progress went to 99%. Half an hour after that it was still at 99%. I killed everything and restarted it all.

Ever since then, as it starts, the camera gimbal pitches up and down to the limits of its travel continuously as soon as it powers on. The gimbal makes no effort to control yaw or roll, it just pitches furiously. Everything else appears to be OK. The app even says the aircraft is good to fly.

I started to investigate and that is when I coincidentally realized that the new card had not quite seated correctly. If my understanding is correct, this means there are no logs of the update yes?

I did an IMU re-calibration which succeeded. Also the Go 4 app reports that the firmware is up to date. I also tried a gimbal calibration. I have never done one before and it appears to make no progress, but I find that unsurprising.

I then found out about the DJI Assistant 2 PC app and installed that. I found out about the unsigned drivers with that app and edited group policy to install the drivers. However when I plug in the aircraft it says "cannot load the firmware list". I also got out an old Windows 7 laptop and had the same issue. I reset the factory settings and that does not seem to have made any difference.

Messing around once this evening, it started normally. When it did, the Go 4 app worked normally and the controller had normal control over the pitch of the camera. I moved the aircraft around and the video feed was rock steady, so all aspects of the gimbal worked perfectly on that occasion. I restarted the aircraft and the same error returned. It has been there for another half a dozen starts since then as well.

The aircraft has never had any ind of incident or stress to the gimbal that is know to either the previous owner or myself.

If anyone has read this tragic tale through to the end and has any insight into either correcting the gimbal or rolling back the firmware as a diagnostic aid, I would be most appreciative.

Cheers, Keith
 
So as an update on the ongoing saga ....

I found a video on how to downgrade the firmware using the DJI Go 4 app. This succeeded. I can now confirm that I downgraded v02.00.0700 back to v02.00.0160. Sadly this had no effect on the gimbal problem. This leads me to believe that either the problem was coincidental but unrelated, or the firmware upgrade damaged the gimbal. Either scenario is a bit of a stretch of the imagination.

So I re-upgraded the firmware again and this time I had a success message. However along the way twice I got a message along the lines of "cannot use device, the current device is not supported" however all seemed to go well. The camera gimbal problem remains. (All app updates had been done on the iPad and IOS is 11.3)

I discovered a very rough way to sort it out. I just hold the camera still for 2 seconds. It stalls, then re-initializes and everything then works as it should.

Short of taking it to a shop with a hardware fault, I am just about out of ideas.
 
Thanks for the reply xspwhite. I have now done the controller and the problem still remains. :(

My gut feeling (remember novice) is that this issue starts very early in the boot process of the aircraft, so I am guessing something is wrong on board the aircraft.
 

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