UDI RC, Falcon U842, no video

[csr0831]

Greetings all....

Please forgive my ignorance, I just retired from my "day job" and am starting a new hobby. I have some flight experience with RC sailplanes when I was much younger, but since these have no "lift", they are a bit of a different animal.

However, my problem is not with flying the thing, its with the camera. This is my second drone in the period of a month. The first one (UDI U818A) I made the mistake of flying it out over the river.......it doesn't float BTW. The current one (UDI Falcon U842) I have had no suck mishap with....yet. I few it the other day.....got about 10 minutes out of the battery and shot video the whole time and it transferred to my computer just fine (with the exception of a little jello). I flew it again this morning and when I got home I noticed the file size was about half of what it was yesterday even with the same amount of air time. The video was fine...but it ended abruptly about halfway through. I did some testing and it will take photos just fine, but no video. There are four wires that go from the camera to the circuit board inside the housing of the quad. My guess is there is a bad connection in that connector or inside the camera?? Just shooting in the dark here. I am going to disassemble it, but I thought I would look here first and see if maybe it was a common problem?? Maybe someone has already experienced it? Most of you folks are probably a bit younger then I am so just caulk it up to senility. : ) Thanks for any help!!

Chris

 

[Bartman]

Chris,

With the lower priced ready-to-fly quads, it's anybody's guess what's going on inside of them. The companies selling them don't really do anything other than order them by the hundred (if not thousands) and then ship them out the door to consumers. Failure rates could be astronomical and we'd never really know about it as most users aren't on the forums like you are.

I'd be curious to see what's inside the shell of yours. Take some pics and post them so we can maybe offer general suggestions.

Regarding the SD card, what I've seen with my own equipment, heli and camera equipment that is , if you delete files from SD cards and then try to reuse them, the deleted card capacity doesn't always add up to open space on the cards. You're usually better off running the cards until they're either full or can be reformatted and then starting over with a clean, newly formatted card.

I'm also going to rename the thread with the heli equipment name and model #.

Thanks
Bart

 

[csr0831]

Bart...

Thank you for taking teh time and effort to respond. It turned out to the be the SD card. I got another one and it worked jsut fine. I suspect what you're saying about space descripencies and reformatting to resolve would be correct.

The first thing I see failing on this thing is the drive gears. The one on the motor shaft is brass and the one on the propeller shaft is nylon. That in and of itself is not too bad, but the problem come when you apply power and the air under the prop becoems pressurized which results in "lifing" the prop and shaft assembly within the limits of the amount of "endplay" there is in the propeller shaft. There is enough play that he motor gear and the propeller shaft gear become..."missaligned". The bottom line is that the brass gear is driving the propeller shaft using only the bottom half (thickness wise) of the nylon gear, thus the load is not distrubited evenly over the face of either gear. I could press the propeller shaft gear a little further down the shaft and the a would help, but I have not yet done that and don't know if I will. I will order some new gears and when I replace them I will set them a little differently.

Anyway, sorry for the long winded tyrade. Thak you so much for your help!

Chris