Intermittent ESC errors

[Jeff48]

My Phantom has over 500 miles on the original unit. The sole issue until now is and continues to be video dropout. No mods have been added except the body was replaced by DJI about two years ago due to stress fractures in the airframe.

After flying over 20 Miles this week alone without a glitch, today I attempted to fly and received an ESC failure message. According to the instructions on the message, I restarted the AC with no change in the message. I shut everything down and restarted, no change. I spun the props and tried again. This time it worked perfectly for a short 10 minute flight. I landed, changed the battery, recycled the AC, app and the controller. Tried again, but got the ESC failure message again. After 3 more attempts, I've just given up on restarts.

Question, is this more likely to be board failure or the "cold solder wiring joint" issue? I've never broken into the airframe and very reluctant to do so. DJI is going to be useless as they will simply say it is out of warranty.

Any suggestions will be appreciated. As you can tell, I am very familiar with this bird and have read most posts dealing with the ESC issue.

 

[quaddamage]

You can check logs for information which ESC causes the issue; in many cases there is a log line which points to specific ESC. But sometimes there isn't.

The logs may inform of the problematic ESC in two ways:
- by non-symmetric messages regarding one ESC, ie. one ESC not responding to some calls
- by "esc good" flags - there is a field with each bit representing specific ESC; if the value is 0xf which equals to 1111(bin) - then all four ESCs are OK. Value of 1110(bin) = 0xe would mean ESC0 failure

Unfortunately, sometimes the ESC flags are updated AFTER the value is written to logs - in this case there is no information, as logs say 0xf.

So even if there is such information in flight logs, it only says which ESC causes the issue, and not what exactly is the error. To get the specific error code, you'd have to sniff the serial communication between ESC and FC.

Until we have a proper sniffer for the ESC messages, diagnosing the issue will be just trying random actions and hoping for the best.

There is a sniffer in these tools, but it still requires some development:
GitHub - mefistotelis/phantom-firmware-tools: Tools for handling DJI Phantom quadcopter firmwares.

 

[Jeff48]

Issue Resolved
Sending to Hani tomorrow!!!!