EMP Shot Down?!?! Hey Bill, strange things are a foot at the Circle K!

[SleepyC]

So in late October I was flying a cool sport quad I have (the RCLogger Eye 650) and filming some footage with a Gopro trying to get a hard mount that would not produce jello.
So I'm up flying and I'm at around 150 - 200 feet. I pan the rig 100 deg and it stops working starts to fall, flips over and crashes to the ground dead smack in the middle of a street. It was not in good shape to say the least.

So after a lot of post crash examination I could not find an issue. The batteries still had a good charge, the receiver still worked. The FC/Motor control boards in the unit all still worked. It left a giant ? in my head.

The GoPro hit so hard it cracked the case and would not fire up to check the footage.

So finally last night I dug into the GoPro and found a few loose wires, I re soldiered them and when i plugged the USB into the computer it saw the GoPro and I was able to pull the footage. (If I tried to just pull from the memory card the file would say corrupt so I had to get the card to boot in the camera)

So now the interesting part...

The footage shows the quad climb and slowly turn and then... BAM it shuts off at the same time the quad did.
The camera is powered by it's own battery.

Is there a chance some kind of radio wave or something hit my rig and killed ALL the electric power on it?
I mean, it's crazy. Both the camera and quad completely shut off at the exact time.

And to add insult to injury, my mount sucked and I had jello everywhere! HAHA

But seriously, anybody experience anything like this?

2 points for anyone who got the Bill and Ted reference in the title.

 

[vispaaja]

Could it be that GoPro buffers the footage before writing to the memorycard and the remaining seconds of the fall were lost when the camera hit the ground?

 

[SleepyC]

Yea that would make a lot more sense. But it is way less dramatic than "I WAS SHOT DOWN!"

Good reply. Now my thoughts of government conspiracies are all blown apart.


Back to finding out why everything shut off! Really weird!

 

[vispaaja]

Who knows, maybe the drone war has already started! :tennis:

I hope you'll find out what brought your heli down! Which FC are you using?

 

[Dewster]

That's scary. Falling drones can cause a lot of damage. Not knowing what caused the blackout/brown out or electromagnetic pulse doesn't give any confidence in flying. Where were you flying? Could there be a lot of transmission towers or electrical fields that would interrupt your craft's flight system. And to think that the FCC is going to lift the ban on electronic device use during take offs and landings (lol).

There are cell phone jammers that can be bought on the internet. I never heard of an EMP pulse cannon. lol. It could be something as simple as a wire coming unsoldered.

 

[SleepyC]

The RC Eye 650 uses RCLogger's FC/motor control boards with scorpion motors. It's a three board system, and has proven to be rock solid.
I was just flying in front of my house, where I have flown tons of times with all my rigs in the past. I was up and just did a small turn to get some footage of the boat canals behind the houses on the other side of the neighborhood and the rig just completely shut off, rolled over and crashed into the middle of the street. It hit perfectly level, and crushed everything. It bummed me out quite a bit. My buddy works for RCLogger and checked out everything and all was working later. It was seriously like it was hit with some kind of pulse. ANd the fact that the camera shut off at the exact moment weirded me out. But now thinking about it, I bet Vispaja was right and the Hero 2 has some kind of buffer and it writes a few seconds delayed. Styill weird.
I have flown several other rigs I have on Hoverfly Boards with the same radio gear with never a hiccup.
Oh well... the best part of RC is we are not inside these things!