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Restarting the Mavic Mini Mid-Air

Is it possible to restart the mini mid-air after an emergency shut-off?
Stop and start are done by the same CSC. In theory, if you are high enough it should be possible, however I cannot comment whether the drone will tumble or be upside down as the free fall is uncontrolled. If you are not high enough, you will hit the ground or the underneath objects and motors will stop even if you had managed to start them.
 
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This has been tested and has worked a few times with flight logs to prove that it works with the Mavic lineup. I think it was a 2nd Gen but can't remember. Each test resulted in a drop of ~50m in height if I recall correctly.

If you was being reckless flying at a crazy altitude and you saw a manned aircraft coming towards you shutting off the motors would seem a wise choice then attempting to restart whilst closer to the ground would make sense. If it crashed then so be it, if it survived then yay.

I think people have done this in the past for high altitude tests to allow them to descend quicker than doing it normally. This seems a bit risky because the only time I'd want to rush the drone down was if it was in danger or if it had low batteries. With the mini I'd imagine if you had low batteries you'd have even less thust available to possible save you from the fall.

Technically you can stop and restart your motors mid air.
The larger mavics have done this and it's been okay.
I wouldn't do it.
 
if you want to stop you can, but you can't start again because the drone will flip in the air, so the motors would not start
 
This has been tested with the larger mavic's and has been proven to work without flipping. sar looked at logs provided and everything showed as legit.
 
chriscuk woozie was one of the fellows whose Mini Fell out of the air. The Logs were analyzed here and when his drone fell, it was tumbling. Now I had mine flying ok for now, nevertheless I'd like to keep my statement that you cannot control it when it's free-falling as there is no propulsion and therefor no control.
 
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But there are videos online of other drones taking a tumble due to hitting a tree or something then the gyros bring it back to a steady flight. There IS a chance.

We can only go on known facts.

1) you can turn the motors off mid air
2) you technically can turn the motors back on mid air
3) larger mavic's have sucessfully completed this maneuver before
4) other drones have recovered from a tumble mid air

I'm not saying its a good thing to do and I'm certainly not saying it will work I'm just stating the known facts. I know for a fact I'd rather drop my drone from the sky and hope to recover if there was a situation with a manned aircraft that I couldn't otherwise maneuver out of the way of.

This video shows it with a mavic pro -
you can see it start to tumble too.

this one almost flips back up

One last one where you see it spin, flip etc etc
 
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Thanks for the info. I would definitively say that this is possible.
Maybe bigger Mavics have a center weight helping them be more stable, maybe the motors act like brakes and spin while the drone drops, who knows.

This is at least a 50:50 chance, all your videos prove this.
 
Is it possible to restart the mini mid-air after an emergency shut-off?


Welcome to the forum.

Up until now no one has done this and documented it with a Mavic Min.. YET!!

Other versions of Mavis have done this with various degrees of success but it should be "possible" to restart the motors.... whether they are able to stabilize the aircraft in a tumble is something that would have to be tested to know for sure.
 
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This interests me.
I have done a deliberate mid air CSC and restart with a P3 adv or Pro, it was an experiment. The video I saw on my phone was remarkably stable, so much so that I thought the drone fell in a flat spin. However when I looked at the DAT file the drone did wobble a fair bit so the gimbal obviously did a good job.
The point of my post is that the rigid props of the P3 were driven by the 'updraught' passing through them and I think their drag above the CoG of the drone helped stabilise the drone during its fall. The props on a mini are tiny in comparison and foldable and I think the big question is whether or not they are big enough to catch the wind and be driven and possibly (big question mark) keep the drone upright.
I have been experimenting with hand held 'mid-air' CSC's of the mini and then severely waggling it (stationary props obviously) during the attempted restart. Sometime the motors would restart and sometimes they would not, I suspect it comes down to the degree of tilt (in any direction) at the time of the attempted restart, too much tilt and they will not restart.
WooZie's drone apparently tumbled which doesn't look good for the prospects of a successful restart.
My next set of experiments will be to try and get a strong 'updraught' through the mini's props and see how they behave, maybe put it upside down in the down draught from a hovering P3 or do something with a leaf blower.
There is one other behaviour of the Mini that might be dangerous, it doesn'tseem to allow motor restarts below quite high battery percentages. (this is coming from someone who is a P3 flyer where I think the restart threshold is 10%)
 
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