First Outdoor Flight

[Barbara]

Been waiting for a couple of weeks now for my first outdoor flight. Its either been too cold (-20 C), too windy, raining and/or snowing. Today was sunny and about -8 C with a wind chill of -14, so off I went.

First short flight went well, though my hands were freezing. Second flight, about a minute in, I got a "Critical Error" indication on the drone status lights, and my phone shut off. The drone still responded to stick inputs so I landed her pronto.

Looking at the flight logs, I see all kinds of Warnings:


Once back home, and with everything warmed up, all worked properly (indoors). The compass was way off and I did a calibration even though it didn't ask for one.

What do you think, just the cold causing the problems? Thoughts anyone?

Got some good video and photos:

 

[Gavieboydgi]

Looks like you had some fun in Atti mode meaning no GPS lock.
And I'm quite surprised you didn't get any warnings about the battery being cold. Looks to me the ice cold wind chill got to the spark or you hit some magnetic interference but looking at your photo it looks like it's in the open.

 

[Barbara]

Ya, we were out on a lake, not much nearby. Not sure why the GPS signal dropped, was only for 8 seconds though. What worries me more are the endless series of "Yaw" errors and the "Compass" and "IMU" errors. Hoping it was all due to the cold.

Pretty sure the last warning, the "Mobile Device CPU fully loaded" was due to the phone shutting down.

Think I'll wait for some warmer weather before I try again. It's going to be a long winter.....

 

[dat1]

I live the same dilemma... It's gonna be a
long winter, we'll need a lot of patience.
Maybe it was too cold. Here, yesterday, it was
3°C - 7 to 11 km/hr wind but 84% humidity.
Didn't take the risk to hurt "Sparky". Like him too
much. Better than my Phantom3 Pro.
Compass error and GPS signal lost can happen,
but yaw, probably due to IMU error are serious.
And all those messages did flood your device.
Very probably due to cold.

 

[mix123]

Have flown multiple times at -5 down to -15. No issues. I guess it's probably pretty important your phone has a full charge and is warm and your spark/batteries are also warm to start. I flew through two full batteries at -5 yesterday without issues.

 

[Barbara]

Did some more reading on the various issues I encountered. It seems my phones battery doesn't like cold as it ages. The phone simply shuts down when they get too cold.

The CPU issue is apparently all too common. I haven't yet read anything definitive as to the cause and less on the solution. Make sure the DJI G04 App and all firmware is up to date, turn the phone to Airplane mode and force kill all other apps seems to be the recommended action.

The yaw errors occur when the IMU and the compass disagree. Not sure why it happened in my case as my first flight, from exactly the same location, had no problems at all.

Getting 25 cm of snow today, going to be a long winter....