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Doing your own Spark repairs - replacing the Camera + Gimbal

ricke

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Jul 22, 2020
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8
Age
64
Hi all, I'm new to the SparkPilots forum but have been flying Sparks for a few years now. I have had a number of exceptionally unlucky flight events that have ended up in crashes and I'm now on my 3rd Spark. I finally got inspired to watch a ton of videos on repairs and am pretty good and tearing down and reassembling my Spark but the Camera + Gimbal assembly, which seems to bear the brunt of most of the crashes is remarkably sensitive. I bought a brand new OEM replacement pair of the camera and gimbal, the assembly went quite well but when I used the gimbal tilt wheel on the RC to lower the gimbal until it was facing down, it get's stuck every time, causing a gimbal overload button. I did recalibration attempts of the gimbal using the calibration tool in the o-gs/dji-firmware-tools toolkit but in the exercises where it is calibrating the gimbal ( JointCoarse & LinearHall), any time the gimbal was rotated all of the way down, it would again get stuck and the calibration would fail. I did some experimenting by holding the Spark upside down while doing the calibration and that seems to have upset the gimbal so that now it is shuddering and shaking when being used.
I may have damaged the gimbal by trying to get it properly calibrated but I didn't expect it would be so sensitive or challenging after the replacement.
Before I start over and order yet another camera+gimbal assembly or even a new Spark, any words of experience from other DIYers who may have successfully replaced their camera+gimbals?

Thanks a lot,
Rick
 
Hello from the Hoosier Heartland ricke.

Good for you digging into the Spark for fixing stuff.

I have yet to open mine up, but I have watched tear down videos with interest.

On projects like the Spark and other products that may fail in the household, YouTube really helps in figuring out how stuff works.
Definitely saved some money on DIY repairs.

Unfortunately I don't have any advice on the camera repair.

But I can welcome you to the Forum. :cool:
 
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There is a video on youtube (I can't find it anymore) that explains a few design flaws on the gimbal. In example, if you tighten the lateral screws too much, you end up with shaky movements and sometimes gimbal overload.
 
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I have had my Spark for a couple of years. Pretty much trouble free and crash free. I tried to launch it the other day to get photos of all the flowering trees in central Indiana. After getting a gimbal overload, In discovered that both screws holding the gimbal/camera were missing and the gimbal fell out. I have no problem with disassembling it and fixing it. The screws are missing and I can't find replacements on any of the parts websites. Does anyone know the size (diameter), thread pitch and length of these screws? Thanks.
Larry M Gibson
Anderson, Indiana
 
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