Mine went in yesterday

[Jayway]

Yip my Logo 600 Vstabi went in, but I am not sure why. Came out of a loop and the heli locked in position, nose down. Nothing on the controls. Here is were I am up for suggestions. Dont think it was fail safe as in this setting my heli turns the motor off - heli was still full throttle (2 other witnesses) and I double checked this afterwards. If the reg (duralite 7.5amp) went would the motor have turned off? I hit hold directly after it went in and the motor turned off. When I got to it, everything was working again - except for two damaged servos (gears). Luckily as it hit the main shaft snapped with the rotor head shooting off about 20m, else there could have been more damage. I am most upset about my packs - basically hovered them 4 times and this was their first flight, they are still intact but have some slight damage. I am leaning towards the vstabi unit at the moment as I know two other who have had issues here in Oz with them. What do you guys think? I am now thinking of putting the unit inn my Trex450 just to test it.
Thanks Jay

[TomC]

Jason,

Sorry to hear about this, I feel for you Mate.

Sounds to me like you might have lost power to the Rx. This will cause the heli to take 'last command' settings, including throttle.

Maybe your regulator hit over current coming out of the loop and caused this. Then by the time it landed abruptly, it reset itself and you had power to everything again. Hopefully this is not a Vstabi issue.

Good luck sorting it out.

Cheers,

Tom C

[ozace]

Sorry to read about this. Its bad enough that the heli went in but with Vbar in the loop it just becomes so much harder to be confident of the cause.

I am pretty sure that all esc's will kill the motor if they loose power from the reciever so that leaves radio, thumbs, Vbar or static (esd)

[Mercuriell]

Yeah bummer mate :( - there wasn't any thunder storm activity around was there ? as this can cause enough RFI to lose control and I think it was Klinger who experienced this recently

[Klinger]

Yeah bummer mate :( - there wasn't any thunder storm activity around was there ? as this can cause enough RFI to lose control and I think it was Klinger who experienced this recently

No i was there at the time, clear sky's and it was the same when mine went offline too john. Only good thing about mine was the V-Stabi was definetly the cause as it was outputting nothing to the servo's and when bypassed everthing worked great! Jay's was totally different and so more mystifying!

Jay, I'd give your power system and Rx a good look over. Power it all up and try tapping / hitting things to look for a fault, load up some servo's then maybe add V-stabi and repeat!

Have you checked with Kev, cause i dont think he put his crash down to V-Stabi and as you said, either us aussie's are getting the experimental batches or there's some weird ions down here in the southern hemishere causing these problems... I dont think so and hope your problems are unrelated to V-stabi!

Should here back about my failure soon, will be interesting to see what made mine fail!

[Jayway]

Kev is still under the impression that it may have been his Vstabi. I will do some more testing tonight. The battery for the RX was fully charged and this was the first flight. It is also holding voltage fiine.

[ozace]

Just because Vbar scares me:

Is it possible to have a vbar setting wrong that would cause the heli to do unexplained things when they go inverted but work ok upright ? (i am thinking revesed gyro sensor setting etc)

I am not discounting Vbar failure but it does seem a little odd that only down here are we seeing issues.

Right now i am concerned about putting my 6003d back in the air with the vbar.

[OICU812]

You guys fly together and both had this happen at same place? Where you fly area 51 or something? LOL jeeez that sucks, is there any possibilty there are some weird frequencies or anything strange radio wise in that are at all.....? I know its 2.4 but...... seems very odd two, same place, and yet I never heard of this on any other board of the unit.,..

[cptsnoopy]

I noticed that you had a hitec 6965 on the tail of your v-bar 600-3d. Did you have any issues at all when doing flips or loops with uncommanded roll or tail movement? Just asking as I found that to make my heli unflyable as it was doing strange things during the flips or loops. Rolls and normal flight were fine. When I removed the 6965 and replaced it with a bls-251 all the problems went away. I doubt that would have affected what you described unless it was turning/rolling because of the tail servo and it caused disorientation at a bad time.

[Jayway]

Cptsnopy, I am using a 9256 on the tail, never tried the 6965. Still slowly going through everything on the heli, hopefully I find something (please). Adam, I have been flying the heli for some time now - must have at least 30 flights on it without any issues, so I dont think its vbar setup related, but I could be wrong.

[Taipan]

Mine crashed due to either thunderstorm or Vstabi. It just went full negative and right aileron on it's own & slammed in knife edge from hovering 2m up! Another cause might've been it was very gusty and a huge gust maybe confused the gyros but seems unlikely.

I'm leaning towards my Vstabi being the cause alright. What with Russ & Jay's crashes. Don't forget all 3 units came from the same shop here!

Been meaning to send my Vstabi to Mikado for a check-up. I'm in no rush to try it again just yet.

Btw does anyone have the contact info for Mikado in order to send it to them? Cheers!

[Klinger]

Mine crashed due to either thunderstorm or Vstabi. It just went full negative and right aileron on it's own & slammed in knife edge from hovering 2m up! Another cause might've been it was very gusty and a huge gust maybe confused the gyros but seems unlikely.

I'm leaning towards my Vstabi being the cause alright. What with Russ & Jay's crashes. Don't forget all 3 units came from the same shop here!

Been meaning to send my Vstabi to Mikado for a check-up. I'm in no rush to try it again just yet.

Btw does anyone have the contact info for Mikado in order to send it to them? Cheers!

mines over there now and i should hear back about it soon
email

Mikado <info@mikado-heli.de>

[cptsnoopy]

Cptsnopy, I am using a 9256 on the tail, never tried the 6965. Still slowly going through everything on the heli, hopefully I find something (please). Adam, I have been flying the heli for some time now - must have at least 30 flights on it without any issues, so I dont think its vbar setup related, but I could be wrong.

Lol, gotta stop smokin that stuff... :D I reread and see the setup correctly. Thank you. I don't imagine that 6965's would cause any issue on cyclic but who knows?

Charlie
:)

[ozace]

Jay i didnt realise you had so many flights. So now we have vbar setup ruled out.

By chance did any of you 3 guys check the vbar settings after the carnage. I am curious to know if the Vbar reset itself, change that to Kev and Jay, Russ was tail sensor failure from memory. I wonder if the vbar doesnt like our photons, atoms or quarks.

Either way i will not fire mine up again until we find out what happened, i am pretty sure mine came from the same batch as Russ's at least and probably Jays.

[TomC]

Hope you guys get to the bottom of all this. I guess it could be due to the high temps and humidity we've had this ozzie summer. I believe it took Futaba a few years to sort out this problem with their gyros.

Cheers,

Tom C

[Klinger]

Jay i didnt realise you had so many flights. So now we have vbar setup ruled out.

By chance did any of you 3 guys check the vbar settings after the carnage. I am curious to know if the Vbar reset itself, change that to Kev and Jay, Russ was tail sensor failure from memory. I wonder if the vbar doesnt like our photons, atoms or quarks.

Either way i will not fire mine up again until we find out what happened, i am pretty sure mine came from the same batch as Russ's at least and probably Jays.

Mate, mine was total V-stabi failure which started with odd tail behaviour just before it died. It wouldnt link to pc after it died!

[ozace]

Sorry Russ, i must have read it wrong. Thanks for the clarification.

I bloody hope we get some concrete answers real soon.

[Jayway]

Adam, all the settings were still fine. I think I may have found the issue, I initially did some low .5 amp check on the RX pack it held up fine, when I did a 4amp load the pack dropped dramatically below 6 volts - this most likely the course i'm guessing - not Vstabi. Time will tell more conclusivly.

[ozace]

Thanks for the update Jay. I am so glad you guys are slowly getting some sense out of this. Power paranoia was one of my biggest concerns when i started with Vbar, high power digi servos and 2.4.

[cptsnoopy]

I have been running a servo amp logger in my Logo600 vstabi for several flights now and I have never been over 2amps draw with my system at any time during the flight. The average amp draw is around .5 to .7amps. The logger is setup to measure all servos plus rx and vstabi at once.

I am using 9451s on the cyclic and a bls-251 on the tail. The rx battery is a TP1320 2s battery and I put back approx 75 to 80 mah per flight. I am using the Align 6amp linear regulator. My logger does not log rx voltage (wish it did) so I cannot comment there.

[Jayway]

This is why I am still not sure. After fligths I am only putting back about 90mah, not much at all. I know a couple of guys who have done Logger tests with very similar results to yours Cptsnoopy, nothing above 2 amps and more average of around 0.8 to 1 amp. The RX pack at 3 amps it did not fail the load test. I am still a little concerned. Klinger can probably verify some of his data logging results for RX.

[Klinger]

Yep, got roughly the same results as you guys, about 100 mah per flight, peak currents around 1.2 - 1.5 Amps so i'm not sure where thats leaves you Jay. Stretching my thinking a bit (starting to hurt a little) but my logger was probable set to 6 reads per sec. What about a very short peak for a very short time that the logger misses, overall the currents would still be low but a large peak current, although very short in lenght could upset something!

[Adam Turner]

Funky things happen when the 3axis gyro comes out of the controller box, maybe this happened during flight?
Did you say duralite? better wiggle every wire and see if it shorts.