Syma X25PRO loves freedom... and flies away!

[Manfred]

A while ago I did the first flight of my new (and first ever) drone. And I ran into a problem that puzzles me.

I prepared everything as best I could: Fully charged drone battery, fresh alkaline transmitter batteries, I calibrated the sensors (gyros/accelerometers, and compass) according to the procedures outlined in the manual, watching for the proper light flashing codes, then confirmed (also by the drone lights) that the GPS had locked in and was ready to fly. Then I took off, using the automatic takeoff function.

The drone took off fine - but kept climbing slowly, and drifting sidewards, slowly too. I could easily compensate for that with the sticks, but I had expected a GPS drone to be more stable than that. It drifted sidewards, front and back, up and down, as if the slight breeze with its turbulence was affecting it, and I couldn't see nor hear any automatic action to counteract this drifting.

Anyway I flew about 20 meters forward, then back, noticing that it went forward far easier than back. Also I tried some sideward flying, this too had a bias, going much faster to one side than the other. I didn't try trimming it at that time, since the drifts were easy to compensate for. Then I rotated the drone over is axis, that went fine. Then I flew an extended circle, by giving it a constant forward speed and controlling its heading. Several times during this I had to correct the altitude, because it kept drifting up and down, but mostly up.

And then, suddenly it stopped responding to control input! It kept hoovering, drifting up and sideways, and there was ABSOLUTELY no reaction to anything I did! After noticing that it didn't react to the sticks anymore, I pressed the return-to-home button, to no effect, and then the automatic landing button, to no effect either. I could do nothing but watch the drone climb slowly and drift away ever faster, out of the field and toward a forested hill. I ran after it, trying not to lose sight, repeatedly trying to activate the return function, and trying to get any control by the sticks - no reaction. Finally - and fortunately - it had an encounter with a treetop at that forested hill, and fell about 30 meters down through the tree.

The ground of that forest section is thickly covered in blackberry and other thorny plants, so I had to get the machete I had in my car for precisely such needs, and hack my way to the place where the drone was. At first I couldn't see it, but by repeatedly arming and disarming the motors via the remote control and listening for the prop sound I finally found it, hanging low in the tree with one prop blocked by a twig.

The good news: It suffered absolutely no damage.

The bad news, of course: It's useless if it loves to just fly away!

As you surely noticed, the control was working fine after the crash, allowing me to arm and disarm the motors. And at the time it stopped working in mid flight, the drone was at most 30m away from me. After retrieving the drone I did a range test on the ground, by arming/disarming the motors several times while walking away, and I had solid control up to a distance where I could barely see the drone, easily 100 meters. So it clearly wasn't a range problem.

Now I need your help to try finding out what happened. I see some possibilities, but since I have no experience with drones, nor with 2.4GHz remote controls, I need help. I do have experience with "antique" 72MHz remote controls, because I used to fly model aircraft in the past, in the days of glow plug engines and digital proportional FM remote controls. I can't remember any case of any of my Futaba radio controls stopping to work in mid flight.

My ideas, subject to your judging:

- Could it be that since the drone was set to slow (beginners) mode, it just didn't have enough speed available to compensate for wind? Does that speed limit act before or after position control? I mean, is the limit a net limit, by GPS, or a gross limit in the differential motor speed?

- Could it be that the drone drifted out of an "electronic fence", and instead of returning into it, stopped reacting? That would be a software bug, of course.

- Or could it be that the GPS signal was poor, and the GPS position reference drifted, so that the electronically fenced area moved away? But even then it should have returned to whatever it thought was its takeoff point!

- Could it be that the drone self-interfered in some way, for example by brush noise from its motors? When it loses the control signal it should return home automatically, which it did not. So the interference would have needed to be so bad that the GPS too lost its signals. External interference is almost impossible, because the location is far away from any interference source. Like 400 meters from the nearest power line, and 600 meters from the nearest house, which happens to be mine, at everything was off at home. The nearest neighbor lives more than a kilometer from that place.

The place where it first lost control was significantly closer than the fartherst place I flew it while it still worked.

The whole flight might have lasted for 2 minutes, and probably less.

I don't know what to do now. If I take off again and it flies away again, there might be no kind tree in its path to catch it for me.

 

[RENOV8R]

Sounds to me like faulty compass calibration. This needs to be done in an open area, void of any interference. This includes anything in your pockets, including car keys and cellphones, which are both excellent sources of magnetic interference. I'm not familiar with this unit but the other thing that comes to mind is that with some GPS quads, the GPS function is disabled in certain flight modes. This is less likely to be the issue than the first scenario, as it would be set out in the user manual, which I'm assuming that you have perused in detail.

 

[Manfred]

I did the compass calibration in an open place, without any cellphone, keys, etc in my pockets, and no watch. The nearest magnetic object was my car, about 40 meters away, surely not a cause for significant field distortion. I'm familiar with this kind of compass calibration, because I have several other gadgets that include electronic compasses. My only doubt relative to compass calibration of this drone is this: The manual says that after rotating with the drone in horizontal position until the proper light flashing code confirms that the first part is done, one should hold the drone in VERTICAL position and rotate it until the next light code. It does not say which end should point up - the front, the back, or a side, or whether it doesn't matter. I held it with the front up.

I will redo the compass calibration before the next attempt to fly. But I don't think it was bad. Because the only stable thing was the heading! The drone would drift front/back, sideways, and up/down, but the heading didn't drift. When I flew that slow circle, it reacted well to my steering input. After loss of control response, I don't know whether the heading went crazy or not. I really can't see from a distance which end points where, and not having video downlink my only way to know the drone's heading has to push the right stick a little forward and see where it goes. When it stopped reacting, I stopped knowing where it was pointing.

The manual doesn't tell anything about flight modes without GPS. Only that indoors the GPS won't work. But indeed some GPS problem might have been involved, because the place where I flew is surrrounded by hills, so there might be reflections causing the GPS fix to jump. But if that happens, I would expect the drone to either follow those GPS jumps, or disregard the GPS and go into a GPS-less mode - but I would never expect it to stop reacting to control input! And anyway, the worst short-term position drifting I observe on my handheld GPS receiver at that place involves a few meters.

How good is the wind resistance of such low cost GPS drones, generally? Can I expect it cope with a slight but turbulent breeze? If not, that might be the explanation for the drifting, but of course not for the loss of control.

I keep wondering if the problem was the SLOW mode. When such a drone is in slow mode, will that also limit the intensity of its reactions to drift, or will it only limit the the range of speed the pilot can fly it at?

I will make the next test flight at some time when there is absolutely no wind. Not today, because today there is more wind than yesterday.

And one more thought came up overnight: My area is located roughly 700 meters above sea level. That's not a lot, but the air is roughly 10% less dense here than at sea level. Could it be that the drone was struggling to stay airborne, and had its motors pretty much topped out, limiting its maneuverability? Maybe with the fully charged battery it had just enough power, but as the battery started to wear down, limiting the maximum motor speed, it ran out of reserve motor speed for maneuvering? Anyway in that case I would have expected it to lose altitude, not to climb! And it did climb. From loss of control to that tree collision it climbed about 15 meters.

Many questions. I hope some of you can enlighten me, at least regarding what's more likely or less likely.

 

[Dugdog47]

If that was it's only flight you'll have to try it again. You never know sometimes these things just work fine on another session. I have an old ford that's the same way lol.

 

[Manfred]

I WILL try again, that much is clear. But right now the weather is horrible.

I'm wondering whether to try it indoors, in the smoothest and emptiest room I have, or else try again outdoors but with a fishing line attached, so it can't fly away, just crash! ;-)

 

[Manfred]

I cleared out a room for indoor test flights. So I can rule out wind and GPS trouble. The results: No loss of control so far, but the stability is indeed poor. I can't do any long flights, no longer than 30 seconds or so, because of poor stability. Just after takeoff it hoovers almost stable, then starts drifting off slowly, to the right and front. At first I can easily compensate for it, but the drift becomes ever faster, until I run out of joystick range to counteract the drift! At that point I land, take off again, and the game begins anew.

So it seems to suffer from a drift that increases steadily during flight (caused by heating? or battery voltage drop?), soon exceeding the speed range in the "beginners" setting. Interestingly this is the exact same drift I observed in my only outdoor flight.

The altitude hold is also rather poor, I have to keep correcting the altitude to keep the drone from touching the ceiling or the floor. It will rise to the ceiling or sink to the floor within less than 10 seconds, after starting from a stable hoover.

The heading is stable, at least. No drift at all in the heading.

So, it looks like the compass works fine, the accelerometer drifts, the barometer drifts too, and it also seems that the GPS stabilization doesn't work at all, since the drift outdoors is the same as indoors.

None of my indoor flights so far lasted as long as that one outdoor flight, so I still don't know whether the loss of control happens at a fixed flight time, a certain distance, or at random, or was a one-time event.

From the point of view of an electronic engineer, the stability seems poor. But from the point of view of a complete beginner in drone flying, I really don't know what to expect. Is such a behaviour normal for a low cost GPS drone?

 

[RENOV8R]

When testing indoors, you can rule out anything to do with the GPS, as it is probably not working due to lack of signal. If your drifting was constant, it could be easily corrected with trim. But the fact that it increases exponentially tells me that there's a bigger problem, maybe a hardware issue. You need to contact the seller and explain the issue.

 

[Manfred]

Today I made some more indoors test flights. I started with the battery fully charged, and tried to just keep it hoovering in the middle of the room for as long as possible. At first it wasn't hard, I only needed about one third of the joystick range, to the lower left, and make small corrections from that position. That lasted for about one minute, with the amount of drift correction required slowly increasing. Then the drone started to get very unstable very fast, and a few seconds later I could no longer keep it from touching a wall and crashing.

I repositioned it in the center of the room and took off again. It started stable but became unstable just a few seconds later. The instability was not just horizontal, but also in altitude hold. I had to use the left stick a lot to keep it from touching the ceiling or the floor. Only the heading remained stable - it never rotates by itself. A few seconds later the instability exceeded my reaction speed, and it crashed against a wall again.

I took off again right away. This time the drone shot up like a rocket, hit the ceiling hard and fell down.

I switched it off and let it cool down. Then I tried again, and again it was controllable for one minute at most before starting to act up seriously.

After letting it cool off again, I decided to try headless mode. It was a total disaster! The drone was totally unstable right from a cold start. Like: Switch it on, link it to the transmitter, switch it into headless mode, arm motors, push the left stick slowly upwards - and the drone takes off, and barely off the ground shoots to one side and crashes into the wall.

After switching off the headless mode, it behaved like in the first flight.

So I'm pretty convinced now that I got a bad drone. One thing is that the accelerometers seem to drift badly as the electronics warm up - and they do get quite warm quickly. Another thing is that the barometer either isn't working at all, or is having jumps in addition to drift. And it's quite obvious that indoors I'm getting the same behaviour as outdoors, which means that the drone isn't using the GPS data for stabilization! When outdoors, the LEDs do indicate satellite search and position acquisition, and indoors they indicate continued search for sats without finding them, and that's all correct - but outdoors the drone was just as unstable as it is indoors, which suggests to me that it isn't using the GPS at all.

If I had bought it in a store, I would go there and ask for help. But I bought it over the internet, on AliExpress, and just trying to explain such a problem to a Chinese seller who doesn't understand English and is using Google Translate, is a nightmare.

So I suppose that I will just accept my loss and put this drone in the trash. Which means a quick end of my voyage into drone flying, because I'm not willing to spend several hundred dollars on a drone that actually works as it should. And ordering another cheap drone from China seems to be too risky.

I'm a professional electronician, and amateur programmer, but I don't suppose there is any way to get into Syma's firmware to try and diagnose what's happening. I will look inside anyway, just out of curiosity, but I don't expect that I can do anything.

 

[Dugdog47]

You should try to get a refund since the product is defective. They might even send you a replacement for free lol.

 

[RENOV8R]

Today I made some more indoors test flights. I started with the battery fully charged, and tried to just keep it hoovering in the middle of the room for as long as possible. At first it wasn't hard, I only needed about one third of the joystick range, to the lower left, and make small corrections from that position. That lasted for about one minute, with the amount of drift correction required slowly increasing. Then the drone started to get very unstable very fast, and a few seconds later I could no longer keep it from touching a wall and crashing.

I repositioned it in the center of the room and took off again. It started stable but became unstable just a few seconds later. The instability was not just horizontal, but also in altitude hold. I had to use the left stick a lot to keep it from touching the ceiling or the floor. Only the heading remained stable - it never rotates by itself. A few seconds later the instability exceeded my reaction speed, and it crashed against a wall again.

I took off again right away. This time the drone shot up like a rocket, hit the ceiling hard and fell down.

I switched it off and let it cool down. Then I tried again, and again it was controllable for one minute at most before starting to act up seriously.

After letting it cool off again, I decided to try headless mode. It was a total disaster! The drone was totally unstable right from a cold start. Like: Switch it on, link it to the transmitter, switch it into headless mode, arm motors, push the left stick slowly upwards - and the drone takes off, and barely off the ground shoots to one side and crashes into the wall.

After switching off the headless mode, it behaved like in the first flight.

So I'm pretty convinced now that I got a bad drone. One thing is that the accelerometers seem to drift badly as the electronics warm up - and they do get quite warm quickly. Another thing is that the barometer either isn't working at all, or is having jumps in addition to drift. And it's quite obvious that indoors I'm getting the same behaviour as outdoors, which means that the drone isn't using the GPS data for stabilization! When outdoors, the LEDs do indicate satellite search and position acquisition, and indoors they indicate continued search for sats without finding them, and that's all correct - but outdoors the drone was just as unstable as it is indoors, which suggests to me that it isn't using the GPS at all.

If I had bought it in a store, I would go there and ask for help. But I bought it over the internet, on AliExpress, and just trying to explain such a problem to a Chinese seller who doesn't understand English and is using Google Translate, is a nightmare.

So I suppose that I will just accept my loss and put this drone in the trash. Which means a quick end of my voyage into drone flying, because I'm not willing to spend several hundred dollars on a drone that actually works as it should. And ordering another cheap drone from China seems to be too risky.

I'm a professional electronician, and amateur programmer, but I don't suppose there is any way to get into Syma's firmware to try and diagnose what's happening. I will look inside anyway, just out of curiosity, but I don't expect that I can do anything.

You are overthinking the matter. Any tampering with the "firmware" will just void any type of warranty you may have.

 

[Manfred]

I opened the drone to look for problems I might be able to solve. And that was a good idea! One of the motor freewheeling diodes had shifted during soldering, so that one of its leads wasn't soldered at all, and was completely in the air!!!!! It's funny that the drone flew at all. Just see the left side pin of the right SS14 diode:



The solder work is quite sloppy. There were many solder balls and whiskers, some sticking to the board, some sticking to parts (like the one visible in the photo, sticking to the left-side diode), and some flying around loosely. I also found a screw that was sticking to the self-adhesive shielding of the GPS module. This screw was extra, it wasn't missing from any position in the drone! So, now I have a spare screw... Such a loose screw or solder blob can easily cause intermittent short circuits, causing anything from erratic behaviour to fire.

These problems prove sloppy assembly and nonexistant quality control.

The GPS shield is a self-adhesive copper tape that was simply stuck all around the back of the GPS/compass module, over components and all. The only insulation was the copper tape's glue! That's not very safe, I would say... I added some kevlar tape between the shield and any points that had better stay insulated.

The 2.4GHz antenna was supported only from its lead, and it's pretty heavy. Not a good idea - a shifting weight is a stability-damaging factor. I fixed it with two tiny dabs of hot glue.

I thought that Syma was a well-reputed brand, making low cost but decent drones. Now I know otherwise.

I wonder what effect the unconnected freewheeling diode had. Probably it caused the MOSFET that controls that motor to heat up far more than normal, which also must have shortened the battery endurance. The heat from the MOSFET might have reached the accelerometer/gyro and barometer, which are very close to that MOSFET, but sit on a vibration damper (foam and metal weight plate) which should also provide rather good thermal insulation. In addition, the lack of a functioning freewheling diode should cause more interference, but I don't know whether that affected the 2.4GHz receiver.

Anyway, after correctly soldering the diode the drone behaves somewhat better, but still not good. The trim still drifts away, but slower than before. I can now fly for approximately 4 minutes continuously before running out of joystick range to counteract the drift. If I land at that point, and do a "sensor recalibration", which basically zeroes the accelerometer and gyro with the drone standing on level ground, I can again take off and continue flying for one or two more minutes - that's the point where the battery gets weak. By the way, the advertised flight time is 12 minutes. The true value is about half that. But this can be partly due to the altitude where I live. And the 12 minutes are probably meant to be until the moment the drone drops out of the air with a totally dead battery.

While doing this I discovered another bug: When the battery warning comes on, the video recording stops! It can be restarted, but it's still a nuisance. I guess I will lose the footage of many landings due to this bug.

I would say that a sensor drift so bad that after 4 minutes one runs out of joystick range to hold position is bad. Now I wonder if this is a feature or a bug. I have a very evil suspicion: All the chips I could identify, such as the BK2425 radio chip, the MPU-6050 accelerometer/gyro, the MMC5883 compass chip, are rated for an absolute maximum supply voltage of 3.6 volt or so. Nominally they should run from 3.3V or less. But both of the voltage regulators I found in this drone are 5 volt types, marked 117-5G, which must be 5 volt versions of the NCP1117. Could it be that by mistake they used a wrong regulator, and are powering the 3.3V chips from 5V????? With two regulators present, it would be very logical that one should be 5V and the other 3.3V.

Unfortuately I forgot to measure the actual voltage those chips get, and disassembling the drone again, with its 36 tiny screws, just to measure the voltage, isn't something I would love to do right now. Also I don't want to wear out the plastic threads through too much disassembly.

If anybody has an X25PRO that flies well, and happens to have looked inside, I would love to know whether that one also has two 5 volt regulators, or one 5V and one 3.3V!

The point is that if really my drone was fitted with the incorrect regulator, and is putting 5V into 3.3V chips, that can easily explain all the trouble of sensor drift and even of chips suddenly stopping to work!

 

[Dugdog47]

Wow you are an electronic wizard! If what you suspect is true it probably happened on a large scale because those drones are known to have problems.

 

[Manfred]

I would love to get into contact with other people who own the same model of drone, or a similar one, to compare experiences and find out whether there is a generic problem.

Looks like I will have to take it apart again, and measure if the 3.3V chips are really getting 5V, and if so, try to trace whether there is a regulator for the 3.3V chips and another for the 5V circuitry, and by mistake 3.3V regulator position was populated with a 5V one.

 

[Manfred]

I opened it again and measured the voltages. No problem there. The 3.3V chips actually get 3.3V, from a second stage of regulation after the 5V regulators.

I made some more indoor flights and discovered that I need to do the sensor calibration with the drone NOT level, but slightly tilted to the left and back. When doing this, it's quite stable. Go figure... Probably there is some asymmetry in weight distribution or prop shaft alignment that requires this tilted calibration to keep it stable.

Using the trim function instead is very hard. As soon as I activate the trim function, the drone drifts away so fast that it hits a wall before I have a chance to control it.

Headless mode is crazy and uncontrollable, at least indoors. But that could well be due to the compass working very poorly inside my heavily steel-reinforced home. I need to test this outdoors. The weather here has been nasty for the last two weeks, so that will have to wait.

And one more thing which is a downer: The camera, advertised as 720p resolution, actually has a much lower resolution sensor, and the image is interpolated to 1280*720 pixels. That largely explains the rather poor image quality.

Why does Syma lie? I mean, this is a low cost drone. A 640*480 pixel camera isn't bad for an $80 GPS drone. But claiming that it's a 720p camera, only because they interpolate the images to that resolution, IS bad.

The interpolation algorhythm works well enough on large solid surfaces, but is terrible with fine details such as tree twig structures.

 

[mark jackson]

I would love to get into contact with other people who own the same model of drone, or a similar one, to compare experiences and find out whether there is a generic problem.

Looks like I will have to take it apart again, and measure if the 3.3V chips are really getting 5V, and if so, try to trace whether there is a regulator for the 3.3V chips and another for the 5V circuitry, and by mistake 3.3V regulator position was populated with a 5V one.

Hey Manfred its a shame you are having issues with your X25PRO I recently bought one and find it does everything OK for the Price it holds altitude and position outside inside with no gps fine adjustments to keep it in position are needed but its a lot easier to fly than my Syma X5SW its a touchy thing hope you sort it out

 

[Manfred]

Mark, glad that yours works as it should.

Meanwhile I did a lot of indoor flights with mine, to practice and to test what's really happening. The main problem I have is very strong sensor drift. After sensor calibration and takeoff, it's quite stable at first, then starts drifting to the right side. The drift gets stronger all the time, until it's so bad that I run out of control range to keep it hovering in place. That happens after about 2 minutes flight time. I land, do a new sensor calibration, take off again, and it's stable again, only to start drifting right again.

I suspect that in my only outdoor flight, when it flew away, the drift became so strong that the GPS position holding ran out of control range.

If I keep landing, recalibrating sensors and restarting, it seems that the sensor drift starts getting slower. Probably the sensor is nearing a stable temperature. But by that time the battery is already running out, and I have only one battery. I can't get additional batteries, because of shipping regulations that forbid shipping batteries into my country unless they are installed in the drone. Totally stupid!

Last weekend I had a visitor who is experienced in drones, doing FPV racing and such. I asked him for his opinion on the drift. He simply told me "this drone is faulty", and suggested that I should put it away and build my own, from individual parts recognized to perform well. Of course he didn't like the geared brush type motors either, but hey, it's a cheap drone...

I opened it again and checked the issue with the 5V vs 3.3V. There is no problem there. The 3.3V chips are actually powered from 3.3V. There are two 5V IC regulators, and the 3.3V is derived from a small regulator circuit which I hadn't recognized as such the first time I looked there.

By the way, the flight time I get is barely 5 minutes before the LEDs start flashing, and about one additional minute after that before the drone will self-land. It's half the advertised flight time... But I'm not at sea level. I'm 740m above sea level, so that's probably part of the reason. On the other hand, 740m isn't terribly high at all. If I remove the camera, flight time is considerably better, due to the lower weight and also not having to power a camera.

Another complaint I have is the low quality camera. Sure, it's a cheap drone, and for the price the camera is right, but WHY do they have to falsely advertise it as an HD camera? It's in truth a much lower resolution camera, with its output interpolated to HD pixel count, but far from actually resolving all those pixels. I had hoped to be able to use this drone for some landscape photography, of a quality I could use on a web page. But it's too bad for that. True HD would have been fine.

The weather has been terrible here for weeks, it's either raining or very windy. When the weather gets better, I will again try outdoor flights - but I will tether the drone at least on the first attempt.

The one thing this drone is doing for me is allowing me to learn the basics about drones. Including the fact that cheap drones aren't always what the manufacturer advertises. Quality control is obviously nonexistent.

 

[Dugdog47]

Manfred I have a drone that exhibits that same drift problem and I believe it's a faulty gyro, no way to fix it unless you can install a gyro into the board.

Your freind is correct, you should build your own drone for $99 or so, it's a much better option that trying to fix a faulty syma.

 

[mark jackson]

Manfred I too was disappointed with the camera .....I put mine into a tree the other day because I believe the GPS was out a bit and then had to retrieve it but that is another story........You might of got a lemon x25 which is a shame as the x25 is not perfect but for the price it is a great introduction ........ I dreamed about flying a camera for years but I have a disability so my left hand is reasonably numb and useless I cant play xbox etc dual controls but I wanted to fly ................. I first tested my left hand with a elcheapo rc car hmmn so so lack of dexterity in left hand ....so I thought why not get a elcheapo drone and see what happens ......Syma X5SW $70 on ebay aussie dollar.......free postage though.
I was in the air and out of control trying to fly one handed but it was fun but too hard was nearly ready to give up especially loosing it on the other side of the river but that is another story.................. so I thought I would give this alt hold a go going elcheapo again as I am on a disability pension the Syma X25 seemed the go only $126 and free postage on ebay and if half the things work it will be great the alt hold and gps have really helped me its not good inside drifts turns I fly the X5 inside for manual practice but yes the camera is a let down so forget about the X25 for what you want to do I know I can fly thanks to the X25 and recently took the plunge and won a auction and got a Phantom 3 so now I have a real camera enjoy learning on the X25 but you will need a serious camera on a serious drone good luck Manfred