Well my Pro 2 is headed back to DJI for repair.

[Blitzkrieg]

So I went for a quick flight the other day, clear skies, mid 30's, good flying weather and since the leaves are off the trees I thought I'd check out the abandoned rail yard that I drive past often. I get up to about 100' and hover over a building and notice that the drone is drifting to the left, Hummmm, ok. I did some quick shots and flew to the far end of the yard. Now the drone is about 500 meters away and about 200' altitude. All of a sudden it takes a dive to 150' and back up to 225' all without my input. Just then I get a message on the screen saying "Main controller data error" So naturally I immediately fly it back to me. On the way it changing altitude on it's own.

After a few minutes I get it hovering above me and it's a fight to get it back down. I ended up cutting the motors at around 50' and letting it fall into a big sand pit. No damage at all. I brought it home and swapped batteries, calibrated the IMU and controller and hovered it for a while in my garage. It was obviously drifting even without a GPS signal so something is wacky.

Oddly enough it flew fine two days before, it was never crashed or landed hard. Air data didn't show anything out of the ordinary in the logs.

 

[Florida Drone Supply]

Very odd. Potential magnetic interference from the rail yard?

 

[Blitzkrieg]

Very odd. Potential magnetic interference from the rail yard?

Thats what I thought also, magnetic interfearance, but there are not many rail lines left, they were all ripped up. Only a few buildings remain. I get the error also on a 2nd test flight.

 

[MAvic_South_Oz]

Strange for sure, I fly close to many metal structures often and no interference.
I think the only one time I got a magnetic interference message was downloading a video once after landing, I had the M1P sitting on a heavy metal picnic table, of course for this process it wasn’t a problem.
Why not post up your txt and dat files for some analysis here ?

 

[Thomas B]

@Blitzkrieg .... Doubt if magnetic force from rails 200’ away did anything to the drone. Either component or software failure likely.
Do you have the flight log to post. The answer is most likely there.

 

[DanMan32]

It said "main controller data error". I wonder if that meant the RC was sending strange data or a component on the AC.

I have heard of a bad USB cable causing weird behavior, perhaps connection not bad/long enough to show up as an RC disconnect, but bad enough to show up as bad data.

As others said, logs of the flight would probably reveal more.

 

[Blitzkrieg]

UPDATE: DJI Received the drone and found a faulty IMU, they repaired it and it's on my way back.

 

[Mike4884]

UPDATE: DJI Received the drone and found a faulty IMU, they repaired it and it's on my way back.

nice....yeah they will tell you they repaired it but you will most likely get a different drone back with a different serial number. pretty sure the way they do it is put yours in line to get fixed after they found the problem and send you a refurbished.