Ok there’s is still one mystery here and that why the act of braking would cause it to go beyond the tilt limit and I have a theory, which is just that, not a conclusion because I don’t know that we will ever know.
When originally looking at this I noticed that the pitch excursion happened during an abrupt throttle up input so my theory has this in mind.
I did some tests today and something I thought was interesting is that the emergency brake only applies to pitch and roll maneuvers. It’s does NOT apply to a throttle input. If throttling up without any attitude inputs from the remote nothing happens. This is true even in windy conditions when the aircraft IS tilting to maintain position.
I did another test to see if when inputting both throttle and attitude with the remote if it would also stop the throttling. It does not. The emergency brake seems to be independent of the throttle control. When doing this test I was cautious and did this at low speed and it thought my Mavic Pro flipped at LOW speed. It was very unnerving even though I’m fully comfortable hitting the emergency brake at full speed in sport mode no throttle.
It doesn’t seem far fetched to me that under the correct circumstances the throttle up command at just the right time during a braking maneuver can cause g forces greater than the motors are able to counter act causing the tilt error.
To demonstrate this effect put your hand out so it’s in the forward pitch state and then quickly change to the reverse pitch State while at the same time raising it up. You’ll feel the whiplash created by this maneuver more so then with just a rapid opposite pitch alone . During an emergency brake we would expect the rear motors to be slowed and the front motors to speed up but we don’t see this. We see all 4 motors speed up. However, we do see the braking in that the front motors are faster than the rear for a short time. We then quickly see the rear motors abruptly go up to max output and the front motors to slow abruptly. My theory is that the drone was put into a maneuver that it lacked the physical ability to recover from and the flight controller stopped the motors. We go see the pitch begin to correct itself but only after the motors are cut. Possibly if there was enough altitude the motors could have possibly been turned back on after the flight controller dumped some inertia by allowing an altitude drop but unfortunately there wasn’t enough altitude and it hit the water.
Again just a theory like the firmware is to blame is a theory but I think there is some evidence when you look closely at the timing of the motor speeds braking maneuver, pitch changes, and RC inputs.
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