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IMU and Gimbal problems (calling for fellow technicians)

rihitz

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Hello there,

A little backstory..
I bought a Mavic Mini from a person that crashed it, with the intention of fixing it (assumed I could do it, because of the extensive experience in DIY drone world). The crash resulted in a weird gimbal behavior and inappropriately working altitude hold. After turning the MM on, it turns the gimbal in all the directions and at the end it does this weird thing where it will tilt the horizon clockwise and anti clockwise a few times, before locking in horizon level (at this point it wont react to the movement of the drone). Sometimes it does this, but sometimes it will turn on just fine. When it gets stuck, I will get an error of "Gimbal stuck..". Now as the altitude was not working properly, I decided to swap out the IMU module as it is conected to the gimbal as well, thinking these two problems might be interconnected. What happened now was, I had an unsuccessful IMU calibration and now it wont go further than 0/5 step. It loads real slowly and the blinking orange light goes solid red after a few seconds, which makes me thing there is another problem. Now if the gimbal turns on fine, it will react to the movement of the drone, stabilizing it, which makes me thing that the IMU itself is working properly, but at this point I am out of ideas where to look. Any help or guidance would be appreciated.

What have I tried:
1. Refreshing the firmware
2. Downgrading and after unsuccessful test again upgrading the firmware to the latest
3. As previously stated, swapped out the faulty IMU/GPS module (it also showed that the barometer initialization has failed beforehand, which is now solved)
4. Checked the connections multiple times
5. Tried different phones
6. Even tried cooling it off and performing the calibration
7. Discharged/charged all the batteries (phone, RC, drone)
8. Tried calibrating indoors/outdoors
9. Put the old IMU module back in, which results in the same behavior as the new one, except the barometer error.

Gimbal related:
1.Used compressed air to try to blow out any debris possibly stuck in the motors or anything alike
2. Tested all the movement directions, which seem to move as freely as possible.

All of the tries result in the same slow calibration percentage growth, with solid red light on, which eventually ends with a "calibration failed". But the behavior makes me thing it takes so long cause it cannot find it, perhaps?

My further plan would be try to replace the ribbon cable that connects the two, but I would prefer not to blindly order parts to just test if it works or not. Could these two problems be interconnected, or that is a long shot?

P.S. before buying it, he showed me in person that the drone flies, the only errors it had then, was the "gimbal is stuck" one, and no other. I just went to perform the IMU calibration, as I was replacing this specific part.
 
Fail calibrating IMU because the main board fail on heating the IMU chip (MP6500). When you do calibration, it will blink yellow then turn to solid red which this solid red mean it try to heat up the IMU to 60°C and when it reach 60°C the percentage will show 94%.

Your main problem is the mainboard(coreboard). Change the ribbon will not solve this issue.
 
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Fail calibrating IMU because the main board fail on heating the IMU chip (MP6500). When you do calibration, it will blink yellow then turn to solid red which this solid red mean it try to heat up the IMU to 60°C and when it reach 60°C the percentage will show 94%.

Your main problem is the mainboard(coreboard). Change the ribbon will not solve this issue.

Thanks for the reply!

Hm, thats odd, cause the mainboard itself gets really hot during the process. Maybe it doesn't get the message that it is hot enough? How would I approach this issue then? The flat ribbon cable is the only part that is connected to the IMU
 
Fail calibrating IMU because the main board fail on heating the IMU chip (MP6500). When you do calibration, it will blink yellow then turn to solid red which this solid red mean it try to heat up the IMU to 60°C and when it reach 60°C the percentage will show 94%.

Your main problem is the mainboard(coreboard). Change the ribbon will not solve this issue.
The following "may" help. I was real curious about the IMU needing to be heated up. I had no idea it was temperature related in any way. So, I Googled "Drone IMU heating" and the first thing that came up was this:
IMU Warming Up

According to one of the DJI guys on another forum you should do the IMU calibration when the Phantom is cold (I left mine outside for an hour one evening), then get the controller on, the pilot app loaded before powering on the Phantom. As soon as the Phantom connects start the calibration. Apparently the calibration runs through a temperature range so when you see IMU warming up it is waiting to get to the temperature range that it was when calibrated.

Okay, I put it in the fridge for 3 minutes and then did a calibration. Now there are no warm up times after that. Woohoo!
 
The following "may" help. I was real curious about the IMU needing to be heated up. I had no idea it was temperature related in any way. So, I Googled "Drone IMU heating" and the first thing that came up was this:
IMU Warming Up

Thanks for the tip! Unfortunately though, I stumbled upon this post as well and gave it a go. At the very beginning I got hyped, caused it seemed to move further the perecentage-wise, but just to end up with the same failed calibration at around 60ish percent. I put it in the freezer for 30 minutes, and during the "calibration" phase it heated really well. As I wasn't aware of the drone heating the IMU to test different temperatures, I felt like it is overheating or something. But could the case be that it just keeps heating it and does not read that the temperature is hot enough to do the calibration? A shot in the dark, but I cannot draw any other conclusions from the information currently available to me.
 
Thanks for the tip! Unfortunately though, I stumbled upon this post as well and gave it a go. At the very beginning I got hyped, caused it seemed to move further the perecentage-wise, but just to end up with the same failed calibration at around 60ish percent. I put it in the freezer for 30 minutes, and during the "calibration" phase it heated really well. As I wasn't aware of the drone heating the IMU to test different temperatures, I felt like it is overheating or something. But could the case be that it just keeps heating it and does not read that the temperature is hot enough to do the calibration? A shot in the dark, but I cannot draw any other conclusions from the information currently available to me.
Your mainboard is the culprit. I know because I have exactly same problem. Unfortunately i have to change the mainboard to solve the problem and this will also cause another issue, "gimbal imu data incompatible". Like it or not, i have to stick to this minor gimbal error, at least my drone can fly normally now.

Gimbal and mainboard is a pair, which only official dji has a software to pair that. So if you change either gimbal or mainboard then you will have "gimbal imu data incompatible"
 
Your mainboard is the culprit. I know because I have exactly same problem. Unfortunately i have to change the mainboard to solve the problem and this will also cause another issue, "gimbal imu data incompatible". Like it or not, i have to stick to this minor gimbal error, at least my drone can fly normally now.

Gimbal and mainboard is a pair, which only official dji has a software to pair that. So if you change either gimbal or mainboard then you will have "gimbal imu data incompatible"

Do you also know, perhaps, what on the main board causes that? Somehow I want to doubt that it's broken
 
Do you also know, perhaps, what on the main board causes that? Somehow I want to doubt that it's broken
I'm not sure what cause that. I have two mavic mini and i try to swap defective mainboard to other which doesn't have imu problem, try to recalibrate IMU and yet still failed. That's how i confirm its from mainboard.
 
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