Drone will randomly stop moving forward despite having no obstacles in front

[romelako]

I was flying my drone this morning and was around 120ft up, clear of anything. I had beginner mode turned off and OA disabled as well. After my drone gets to a certain distance (usually further away), the HS will decelerate to 0 randomly, despite there being nothing in front of it. It seems to hit a limit, but then I'm able to continue moving forward again. Then shortly afterwards it will stop again. I am 5mi within an airport and I sent a notification prior to my flight with the B4UFLY app.

I thought this could be a function of the drone being in AF mode so I changed it to manual and I was still having the same issues. When the drone is close, it seems to function fine. Higher up and further away it stops. Could it be a due to interference? I'm flying it around my apartment complex.

 

[Congoblue]

The sun shining into the forward collision sensors can cause this on the original Mavic Pro. Was the drone facing the sun?

edit, sorry I just realised what "OA" means so presumably these sensors were disabled. If you post your flight logs here, someone will be able to analyse them for you and determine what happened.

 

[romelako]

I have several FlightRecord files. Here is the one from my first flight today.

 

[Fly Dawg]

the HS will decelerate to 0 randomly, despite there being nothing in front of it. It seems to hit a limit, but then I'm able to continue moving forward again. Then shortly afterwards it will stop again.

On a quick glance, I don't see anything impeding your forward or back progress. The only thing I will suggest and this may be a stretch for a quick look is that there are several very small throttle inputs at distance just after or just before you release the elevator. Is it possible you confused the sticks briefly?

 

[romelako]

It's a possibility as I'm still quite new to flying. However, I am using the traditional setup with the left stick being up/down and rotation and the right stick for forward, back, L/R movement. There are periods during the flight where I'll be holding the right stick forward and the drone will halt (perhaps it's due to the OA, despite being turned off?) and I'll have to release the stick and re-push it forward in order for it to keep going. However, the other movements such as up/down, roll left/right and reverse seem to function quite quickly and the drone moves very fast.

 

[romelako]

I was able to figure out the reason why it would randomly decelerate. The right control stick was not calibrated properly. Pushing it completely forward to the north position only translated to around 40-50% of actual movement from the starting position. It likely was decelerating due to moving slowly + the wind preventing it from moving forward. I re-calibrated the sticks and it works perfectly now.

 

[Fly Dawg]

Pushing it completely forward to the north position only translated to around 40-50% of actual movement from the starting position.

That makes perfect sense. As I said, I only did a quick look at the data, but going back and looking again at the elevator inputs, it does look like it was "hanging up" at around 50% and occassionally "bouncing" to a higher level but not to 100%. The flat line below in red and the small jump shows that. Glad you found the issue!

 

[lewmhill]

Are you by chance hitting, bouncing off, a geofence zone? Feels really weird, just stops moving as you try to enter the zone. FAA clearance is unrelated to the unlock from DJI.

 

[Fly Dawg]

Are you by chance hitting, bouncing off, a geofence zone?

Not the case here. Assuming the OP applied full elevator, which is fairly obvious that he was attempting to do. The signal would have been at +10000. As you can see from the above the elevator was "stuck" at ~ 40%. There is no indication of a geo-fence stop.

 

[The Editor]

Are you by chance hitting, bouncing off, a geofence zone? Feels really weird, just stops moving as you try to enter the zone. FAA clearance is unrelated to the unlock from DJI.

Look at posts #6 and #7 posted the day before yours.