Cheerson CX-20, goes berzerk commits suicide... what happened?

[Wingnutt]

First time posting so, hi.. I wish I was here for more enjoyable reasons.

So I've played with a few smaller cheap quad copters and a few of my friends have them, so I figured I would go ahead and get a somewhat descent one that could carry my GoPro.

I settled on the Cheerson CX-20 due to the features it offered at the price point, primarily the automatic return to home feature, which makes the quad automatically return if communication with the controller is lost, low battery, or if the user switched it to "return to home" mode.

The Fail safe functions were the biggest draw for me, being new to this and not wanting an investment to immediately be destroyed..

It arrived Friday and I assembled it and took it for a short test flight in the back yard, everything worked very well, I tested the return to home feature and it worked well, the quad flew back and landed within about 5 feet of where it took off from with no input from me, great.

Ill admit, even being a 35 year old grown ass man, I still had trouble sleeping, I was really excited to go play with my new toy the next day

Skip forward to Saturday, I head out to my friends house in the country, eager for some more flying in a much more spacious area.

I mount up the GoPro and power up the drone, sync the remote, it takes about 20 seconds before the green light comes on indicating a GPS lock, good to go.

Off we go, for the first 20 seconds or so the quad is flying perfectly, I start heading out towards the back of the property. I intend to stop and turn around and face the camera towards us.. but there is no response.. Then it starts climbing.. and heading away.. I activate the return to home function, no response.. it keeps moving away... Then suddenly goes full throttle and climbs to about 200 feet and begins hovering. Still no response to the remote. I run out after it and get directly under it, I can hear it beeping (remote signal lost) .

Its supposed to auto-land in the event of a loss of signal from the remote but its just sitting there..

It slowly begins to drift away, me chasing it. I try everything, including turning the remote off and on and going through the re-paring sequence.. nothing.

After close to probably half a mile it starts beeping low battery. Its supposed to auto-land in the event of low battery but it does nothing..


Another minute or so passes and suddenly the quad cuts throttle.. begins to fall, flips upside down, and then increases power and rockets into the ground upside down.

Everything is trashed, including the Hero 3, the impact was so violent that everything just flew to pieces, total loss.


I'm more than a bit pissed off, every single feature to prevent this kind of thing from happening completely failed.

It failed to return to home when that mode was activated
It failed to auto land when remote signal was lost
It failed to auto land when the battery became low..


I emailed the place I got it from explaining what happened, but realistically is there any chance they will replace it? I haven't heard back from them yet.

I understand user error and that crashes happen.. but this thing just straight up malfunctioned and the damage was a direct cause of that, not me.


What ya think?

 

[Thomas in Niagara]

Sorry for your loss man. That sucks and I would definitely go after the supplier. Were you able to retrieve any video from the card? You might get a clue ab out what happened by listening to the motors from the last operation you passed along as an instruction to the quad. Just a thought. I'm light years from a quad with those capabilities but it sounds like you may have a problem with your TX. Trying to re-establish your connection while it's still in flight may have been a connection killer. I've had a fly away with my X5C-1 but only because I lost orientation and I flew it off into a treetop. I too tried everything to stop its buggering off with no luck. Good luck with the supplier. Hope they treat you right.

 

[Wingnutt]

I watched the video and there isn't much to see really.. Everything looks perfectly fine if you forget that I'm not controlling it.

At the end you hear the motors Throttle way down, it begins to descend, the tumbles upside down.. Then you hear then motors Throttle up then... Blackness.

 

[sailorsam]

agree, defective unit. hope your supplier will come thru.
I had a Walker that went nuts and flew away, lost. They agreed to exchange asked for old unit to be returned. I was going to return the box / controller and parts with a note of explanation; happily I found it the day before sending and did the exchange wi no problem.
mind telling us your supplier? That's a good thing about Amazon, they're usually real good on this stuff.

having said, it's possibly operator error. My UDI has headless / RTF but you must set it after launch (I know you said you set it) and hope you don't accidentally unset.
also, a freak breeze might have carried away. remember, winds aloft might be stronger/different than ground level. I lost a UDI despite RTF; I remember jamming that stick, pressing RTF, nothing, it just zoomed away.

 

[Thomas in Niagara]

Acronyms.. they're killin me. I thought RTF meant ready to fly.... Is the button not RTH like return to home or am I missing something here? I use to work for Bell Canada and talk about acronyms... geesh we use to talk whole sentences without using a noun or verb. Feel foolish asking and will probably Gargle the answer before you respond Sam... LOL.

 

[Wingnutt]

Well the discussion with the seller are not going well, they are saying, in their broken English, that "a car antenna probably interfere with, making not respond"

I installed the software for it and connected it to the computer today, and discovered that all of the fail safe options were DISABLED.

The function to return to home if communication was lost, and the low battery auto land were both disabled, either of which would have saved this thing.

I am more pissed off than I can convey.

I have been trying to fix it, but all I get is this:

I sent them this video of the constant beeping and total lack of response to any inputs, no reply.

 

[Glo]

I am dealing with a sort of similar experience from a Flying 3D X8. Mine was similar in I received a defective quad that crashed itself. I did find that it was the programming set to the flight controller. All the sensitivity settings were set to max at 200% and GPS lock was set to fly in a circle instead of hold in place. That's what caused mine to fly full speed into a tree the first time, then my house the 2nd time.

What website did you buy from? I bought from Gearbest. I had to deal with their support before. They were slow and dragged it out way longer than they should, but in the end they did give me that refund. Now they are back to dragging their feet on this issue. If they don't resolve it, I will resolve it for them by going to the bank and disputing the charges, then telling them to send a prepaid shipping label if they want their junk back.

I wouldn't give up and just eat the cost. I've heard of these sites offering exchanges without too much fuss, or at least partial refunds. If they don't work with you, go to review sites like resellerratings.com and post negative reviews. Don't just bad mouth them, tell what happened in detail like you did here. Most of these sites try to keep a good rating on there and will see your review then reach out to you. That's what happened my first go with them.

Good luck and keep us posted.

 

[Thomas in Niagara]

Hi Glo, Curious how you were able to access the flight controllers data? I'm no brainiac so just the basics please. I've heard others talk of finding out the calibration was off. Are you able to reset this data to restore function? Or is the flight controller pooched but you can still read the settings? Thanks mate.

 

[Glo]

The manufacturer claimed that I could enter the firmware through the USB port without any drivers. However, that did not work. I instead found out that the flight controller is the Bigshark x6. So I went to the Bigshark website (http://www.bigflyshark.com) and downloaded the Flight Controller Assistant.

To get it to work you have to plug in the battery to the quad, turn on the transmitter and pair, then hook the USB cable to the PC and run the FC Assistant. It can do a lot without any satellites, but in order to access all functions you need about 3 or 4 satellites. Once in there you can change more settings than you probably want to wrap your head around including "no fly" zones, range limits, sensitives on everything and a lot more. You can also update the firmware through this as well. There really ought to be a tutorial out there since even Bigshark don't tell you how to do all this. I figured it out by piecing together different thoughts scattered throughout the web. I think I might make a tutorial for it when I get some down time.

For your case I don't know what kind of FC you have. Once you find out, go to the manufacturer of that and download their software and try it out.

 

[Thomas in Niagara]

Thanks Glo! Don't think my Syma X5C-1 is all that complicated but I will look into it just for curiosity sake. I know already mine doesn't have a tick beside 'Avoid Trees'