Guess it's my turn for the Phantom to act oddly.

[pwright]

Went out this weekend to some remote property to fly the Phantom. Did a quick flight when I got there and all was fine.

Following morning I pop in a fresh battery, wait for the Phantom to do it's warm up and GPS home lock and away we went. It's flying around and I notice that I'm getting the fast red blinking after just a few seconds of flying. I'm thinking that it is strange that the battery is already low and I fly it around for like 4 minutes with it flashing like that. Bring it back in and land with no issues. So I grab another freshly charged battery. Pop it in the Phantom and it seems happy. Try to take off and the front takes off faster than the rear so over it goes. Grrr. Clean up the props. Take the camera off. Put battery back in and it tries to do it again. Change from GPS to ATTI mode and it takes off but is a bit erratic so I pack it in.

Back at the house I hook it up to the NAZA Assistant software and no errors are seen. I didn't try an Advanced Calibration as I haven't read through that. What I did see, but didn't realize till later, was that the low voltage settings were very close to the normal voltage of the batteries. I need to find out what the typical values are for the Phantom and included battery.

Will try an Advanced Calibration tonight (probably) and see if that addresses the flipping over on its back thing. My battery tester says my batteries were good when the Phantom was complaining so I'll have to look into that as well.

 

[Gizmo3000]

Advanced Cali will always help with the tipping over.
i'd suggest starting off flying with the "other" battery rather than the one that initially didn't have much juice left in it,just to be sure.

 

[MRSpyder2U]

According to the last video on this page http://wiki.dji-innovations.com/en/index.php/Phantom-Installation_Video, the rapid flashing red LED can indicate a "system error warning". How you're suppose to tell the difference between that and a "low voltage" is beyond me. Anyway, it also indicates that it can be fixed in the "assistant software".

 

[pwright]

I find it kind of disturbing that it will just start acting flakey like this from one flight session to the next with no apparent cause. I've never even crashed it (knock on wood).

Well hopefully an Adv. Cal. will address both issues and it will be back to normal.

 

[auck]

i noticed that i had flashing red lights on two occasions. the first was when i mistakenly plugged in a battery that was low on power, and the second was when i had placed the phantom NEAR a chunk of metal. i really think the compass mechanism is a lot more sensitive than what DJI is letting on so be extremely careful of where you place the Phantom, specially around metallic and magnetic stuff.

 

[Sac D]

Mine was so flakey that I got into the habit of doing an advanced + basic calibration EVERY TIME before I left the house... then when I got to the flying area, I did a TX calibration AND a compass reset EVERY SINGLE TIME before I flew. It still didn't prevent a disaster... and the **** thing took off for parts unknown.

 

[pwright]

I should probably look into that TX calibration process just on principle.

But the good news is that after an Adv. Cal. my Phantom is back to flying normally.

Now if the dang March wind would go away.