I just finished flying Phoenix, which is the Mini-2 that had the malfunction. I'm in an unusually good position for testing Mini-2 issues, since I have three of them, and I use the same phone for all three, and fly from the same place. This keeps the variables to a minimum. And while three isn't an enormous sample size, it's a great deal better than just one!
I don't think this is a firmware problem per se. I think it's a firmware installation problem.
My sequence is to start DJI Fly first, then the AC, then the RC. As soon as I turned the RC on, it started beeping like mad, saying that it needed the RC calibration. The path to the re-calibration command has always been counter intuitive for me, but I found it again, and did the re-cal.
It also said it had firmware that it needed to install, so I told it to do that, and watched as the update was done. It took a fair while, several minutes. It seemed to "lock up" at a few points, but progress counters are notoriously inaccurate. It finished without incident.
At that point, I turned off and rebooted the phone, the AC, and the controller, and I went to go fly.
I went through a very deliberate testing process. After lift-off, I moved it slightly around in all directions, and all was normal. I climbed to 50 ft, then came back down. I climbed to 80 ft, then 125 ft. All normal. I climbed to 385 ft. No problem. I moved away a few hundred feet, and hit the RTH, perfectly normal.
One thing that's been happening more recently is when I update, it resets all the limits in the "Safety" section to low lame values. It had reset the max altitude in the SW to 393 ft. Since I get much higher than 400 ATO (above take-off) when I climb up the opposite side of the canyon (always under 400 ft AGL), I reset that back to the max, 16XX ft. On earlier flights when I saw odd and inconsistent altitude caps, I didn't realize that in addition to the HW max limit, there was an internal control limit that you can set. Now I do.
All was then going well until I got another error, "Vision Sensor Error. Contact DJI for support". Uh-huh. Right. I'll do that if it happens again on the next flight, but I did immediately bring the bird home, and landed without incident.
One of the numerous SW jobs I had was managing the installation of Management Execution Systems (MES) for pharmaceutical manufacturing companies. It was pretty state of the art. In practice, whenever there was an update, we had to send an engineer out to do it, because the updates were tricky and usually didn't "take" on the first try.
I think something very much like that is the source of the Failure to Climb Malfunction. In this last big update round, I think the firmware installation process was (is) failing for some people, but doing so in such a way that it doesn't know that it's failed. The installation was defective, but not in such a way that it knew it was defective, and in such a way that it could still run.
Been there. Done that. I've seen this before!
If this is the case, and DJI knows it, they may have already fixed the part of the code that caused the installation failure. The firmware update itself may be perfectly sound. If this is the case, the solution is to just do the next update that you see, and all will be well. That's fully consistent with my experience today.
Ahhh, the good old days! I'd love to be part of the engineering team that sorts out and solves these kinds of problems.
But perhaps, in a way, I'm doing exactly that, by participating in this forum!
Field reports from other Mini-2 flyers who have observed this problem greatly appreciated!
Thx,
TCS
I don't think this is a firmware problem per se. I think it's a firmware installation problem.
My sequence is to start DJI Fly first, then the AC, then the RC. As soon as I turned the RC on, it started beeping like mad, saying that it needed the RC calibration. The path to the re-calibration command has always been counter intuitive for me, but I found it again, and did the re-cal.
It also said it had firmware that it needed to install, so I told it to do that, and watched as the update was done. It took a fair while, several minutes. It seemed to "lock up" at a few points, but progress counters are notoriously inaccurate. It finished without incident.
At that point, I turned off and rebooted the phone, the AC, and the controller, and I went to go fly.
I went through a very deliberate testing process. After lift-off, I moved it slightly around in all directions, and all was normal. I climbed to 50 ft, then came back down. I climbed to 80 ft, then 125 ft. All normal. I climbed to 385 ft. No problem. I moved away a few hundred feet, and hit the RTH, perfectly normal.
One thing that's been happening more recently is when I update, it resets all the limits in the "Safety" section to low lame values. It had reset the max altitude in the SW to 393 ft. Since I get much higher than 400 ATO (above take-off) when I climb up the opposite side of the canyon (always under 400 ft AGL), I reset that back to the max, 16XX ft. On earlier flights when I saw odd and inconsistent altitude caps, I didn't realize that in addition to the HW max limit, there was an internal control limit that you can set. Now I do.
All was then going well until I got another error, "Vision Sensor Error. Contact DJI for support". Uh-huh. Right. I'll do that if it happens again on the next flight, but I did immediately bring the bird home, and landed without incident.
One of the numerous SW jobs I had was managing the installation of Management Execution Systems (MES) for pharmaceutical manufacturing companies. It was pretty state of the art. In practice, whenever there was an update, we had to send an engineer out to do it, because the updates were tricky and usually didn't "take" on the first try.
I think something very much like that is the source of the Failure to Climb Malfunction. In this last big update round, I think the firmware installation process was (is) failing for some people, but doing so in such a way that it doesn't know that it's failed. The installation was defective, but not in such a way that it knew it was defective, and in such a way that it could still run.
Been there. Done that. I've seen this before!
If this is the case, and DJI knows it, they may have already fixed the part of the code that caused the installation failure. The firmware update itself may be perfectly sound. If this is the case, the solution is to just do the next update that you see, and all will be well. That's fully consistent with my experience today.
Ahhh, the good old days! I'd love to be part of the engineering team that sorts out and solves these kinds of problems.
But perhaps, in a way, I'm doing exactly that, by participating in this forum!
Field reports from other Mini-2 flyers who have observed this problem greatly appreciated!
Thx,
TCS
