Saturday, November 18, 2017

Mavic gimbal problem and missing rear foot.

Having thought that the morning frost would make a good photo I managed to get stuck in the apple tree!

A ladder was fetched from the shed and much prodding of branches finally brought the Mavic back to ground with a thud. I am guessing that it landed on the gimbal as apart from some broken propellers and a missing foot the Mavic would not initialize the gimbal on start-up.


As you can see in the photo the gimbal/camera assembly looks normal but the foot was AWOL.

I managed to fix the gimbal problem by some judicious "adjustment" of the bearing of the axis of the gimbal that was sticking. Manually moving the camera in the gimbal, in this case from left to right, as shown with the camera oriented as shown above, I could determine where the gimbal was snagging. Applying some pressure in the direction away from where I thought the bearing was binding freed it and it then returned to a more-or-less central position when released. Performing a gimbal calibration and on start-up the gimbal was sticking in this position. Now the calibration proceeds with flying colours (literally).

I am now flying without the extender legs but I did get a downward sensor calibration error which I now know how to fix!

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