My Spark took a bath...

[SpeedCore]

... in the Baltic Sea I took a flight (my 50th flight btw) along the shore of the Baltic Sea and wanted to take a pano shot at approx 300ft agl. The RTH height was set to 20m as you can also see in the flight log below. When the pano aborted due to "camera error" I decided to activate RTH with 27% battery power remaining and then the disaster took its course: The Spark ascended to over 500ft (despite 20m RTH height configured) and went back and forth until auto-landing kicked in due to low battery. It descended and gave me a message like "surface not suitable for landing, proceed with landing?" and then it was gone.

I took my iPad and ran to the last location - that was in knee-deep water. I found the Spark with my feet on the ground of the sea and pulled it out. Now it's completely disassembled on the kitchen table: the mainboard, gps module and front sensors are in a bowl with rice and the main frame with the motors is sitting on the radiator.

I'll put it back together tomorrow and I'll hope that it will still work. I'm wondering if it was a pilot failure or if the Spark just did act weird and I can force DJI to get into warranty (don't think to now that I opened it, but I wanted to rescue it!). I'd greatly appreciate if you take a look at the floght log and tell me your opinion.

DJI Flight Log Viewer - PhantomHelp.com

 

[SpeedCore]

Forgot to mention that the RC beeped and blinked red when I turned it on. It turned out that the joysticks had to get calibrated (for whatever reason) so I did that and flew around the beach in sport mode, which went fine. Just wanted to mention this pre-flight joystick calibration, in case the behavior could have been triggered by that.

 

[SpeedCore]

It survived! I reassembled it again, checked it thoroughly and took it for a short test flight. The only thing I had to adjust was the gimbal roll. It was under water for approx 10min (salt water) so I’m really lucky it didn’t take any damage! All water indicator stickers inside were red... I’m still curious what could have triggered this strange behavior. Any ideas?

 

[Kassie]

Wow, that is some story, would be interested to hear why it happened...

 

[pmshop]

That naval base nearby could have blasted you with some unexpected RF interference.
I would be very careful flying next to an establishment like that.
Here in the states, it is a serious offense flying near a naval base.

 

[KSBV]

Was it raining or foggy? The VPS was indicating an altitude when you were well outside of it's normal range. This will interfere with the Sparks ability to descend as it thinks it's already close to the ground when in fact it's hundreds of feet in the air. It looks like it just stayed up there looking for the home point it recorded until it went into an emergency landing due to low battery. It almost made it all the way down before the battery died. It looked like it fell about 80 feet.

Not sure why it ascended first but i see the VPS altitude was about 3m at the start of RTH so the Spark may have gone up as it thought it was well below the 20m RTH altitude.

Glad you found your spark!

 

[The Editor]

It survived! I reassembled it again, checked it thoroughly and took it for a short test flight. The only thing I had to adjust was the gimbal roll. It was under water for approx 10min (salt water) so I’m really lucky it didn’t take any damage! All water indicator stickers inside were red... I’m still curious what could have triggered this strange behavior. Any ideas?

If it took a bath in salt water....it's days are numbered.
Corrosion has already begun.

 

[nazorbeats]

If it took a bath in salt water....it's days are numbered.
Corrosion has already begun.

THIS. Sorry for your crash @SpeedCore . I don't want to scare you, but it is true. You might start experiencing weird stuff going on with your bird. I would totally give the motherboard a bath in ultrasonic cleaner, or at least just clean it thoroughly with an isopropyl alcohol. I drowned few electronic devices in past and only my iPhone 6 (which was submerged in water only for 2 seconds) remained working until today. The others eventually started to malfunction in various ways. At first only small glitches were happening (for example really slow CPU on my iPhone 4s), then bluetooth/wifi module / display backlight (or other important component) stopped working and after few weeks/months, the devices were not working at all... As i said - I don't wanna scare you, but keep in mind that you're flying damaged bird and that it might fall out of the sky anytime...