Overloaded motors

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a general question or two:

one time as i was just getting used ti landing a drone, i took a small spill in some grass... really slow crash, really minimal stress put on the a/c compared to others who claim they've crashed from many tens of feet up.... when this happened i got a "motors overloaded" message and immediately shut the a/c off.

with that said, everything has been fine the last few weeks sinceit happened... but today i noticed one of the motor arms vibrates a little bit... once its in the air, it flies pretty smoothly with the occassional drift in the air (despite IMU/Compass/Gimbal calibrations).

So with that said, if you overload the motors for a couple seconds, will there be long term motor damage? Could that cause vibrations when the bird is lifting off? And if you leave a gimbal lock on once or twice by accident when you turn the phantom on, will THAT ruin the gimbal motor?


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I don't think so. The phantoms are pretty tough. Did you notice any difference?
 
It could be that one or more of your props got damaged during the crash. Try changing out all 4 props to NEW ones then see if it still vibrates. If the vibe stops, then change the props back one at a time until it vibes again and you know which prop is bad. If it still vibrates with all new props, then one of the motor shafts might have bent when you hit.

Also, take a whiff of all 4 motors and see if one or more smells burned. Look inside of them, they should all be bright copper colored. If one of them is blacker than the rest, it might be on its way out. That might not cause vibration but could be underperforming the others and causing stress to the speed control.

The gimbal motors are strong but if you leave the gimbal lock on enough times when you turn it on, your motors can get damaged then you can get a jiggly pitch roll or yaw picture when the motor is trying to find center. Either leave the gimbal lock off altogether or use one of these that they use on full scale aircraft. It makes it hard to forget to take it off:

Remove before flight.jpg
 
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@Rideswings Good call, I need to look into that. I have my setup in a shock proof case but i figure the gimbal and camera would still get knocked around without the gimbal lock, so i use it every time i go out. i have a slight gimbal roll issue that i can minimize with the settings. Thanks everyone


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