Graham's Blog

Long time since I wrote anything on here , but anyways.

My poor ole AR Drone 2.0 has been sitting in its box all broken for a while, although the main board worked mostly (except for the data line was short) , which meant I could no longer use the Radio controlled mod with it anymore and so it was just left as wifi only.

The motors where falling apart and it also had a broken cross which I had glued back together and the body had been cut about a bit when I was fitting a naze32 flight board and esc’s on it. (Waste of time as it turned out too heavy for the motors.)

So worked out with needing to buy a new main board and central cross , 4 x motors and a body with Parrot’s expensive pricing on parts , it was not worth it.

Recently I bought a broken AR Drone that had been left in a garage and gone rusty, it was a bit more than I wanted to pay, but took a chance.

Oiled up and let soak the motors and they were rusted solid , but after a long soak I gently got the shafts to spin again and put in a battery and tested the motors with the props off.

Just let it boot and motors kicked , so thought promising….

Checked out wifi and also updated the way out of date firmware and then hit take off and all motors ran up fine, so thought I would leave them running for 30 secs then power off and did not feel too hot consider they had rusted away very badly around the bearings.

Done that about another 4 times and then on the 5th run all the leds went out, and main board was dead!!

So was looking like a waste of money ……..

I took the main board out and it was covered in rust, I really should have done this before I ran it.

Plugging in the lipo the red led flashed on all the motors once and went off.

I thought that kinda indicates some pwer is getting to motors.

So put it aside and thought although I have a box of blown or dead main boards , maybe I would look deeper into this one.

Ever since I upgraded the firmware on this , it has seemed so much less stable.

In fact it has a tendency to now and then, either shoot up high at take off or take off and hover low and spin around and crash.

Tried a new main board and new nav board and same problem.

Does not happen ever time , but had it do this quiet a few times now.

So removed the GPS Flight recorder and tried again and hit the take off button and it shot up 20 feet into the air!

Tried again in house to be safe and this time it took off about 1 foot and then spun around and flipped over.

Tried 1 more time out in back yard and seemed ok this time took off and was seeing how it performed without the GPS flight recorder and there seems to me to be no difference to stability with or without GPS flight recorder attached. But coming to end of flight it yet again spun round and flipped over.. Grrrrr

I am now assuming that GPS Flight recorder makes no difference if you are flying low down and maybe it only makes any difference if either over a certain height? or when you are using the app to a waypoint..

So from my tests so far, its not really added much for the price to what it did before.

So for now I am going to downgrade the firmware and see if the drone becomes more stable again. Of course this means for now not using the gps module.

Maybe Parrot can sort out the firmware and also make more use of the gps module and also please more info and instructions at least on how it works..

Anyway going to now see how it fly’s with old firmware……

Replaced the burnt out chip on the AR Drone motor pcb today and put it all back together and connected battery and hit take off and motor spun up and then motors cut out.

Tried again and same thing.

Lucky enough I did buy 4 of them anyways.

So pulled it all apart and this time replaced the other 2 MOSFETS and tried again and his time all works fine 🙂

So looks although only 1 chip blew apart it does indeed kill all 3 and for future if/when this happens again, will have to replace all 3 at a time and not just the one thats blown apart.

After about 2 weeks of waiting to test the AR Drone flight recorder, as long last the wind dropped under 5 mph!

Plugged the battery in and a loud crack.

Sadly the electronics in the AR Drone has let me down again, this time it was one of the chips on the motor pcb that decided to nuke itself.

As you can see in picture the bottom left has a part blown off above pin.

The ic is a MOSFET and type is – DMC3028LSD

A new motor from Parrot is around £40! The cost of the part? £2.50 each which i managed to locate locally.

Could have got it a lot cheaper from Digikey, but with postage from USA would have cost more anyways.

Bit disappointed that again the electronics has failed on this drone though.

Hopefully shall get the new part in soon and then be able to test the Flight recorder more.