Emotion Mavic (Eachine E58) will turn on, but propellers won't start

[publicradio]

Hi there, I have a drone called Emotion Mavic, but I'm pretty sure it's a rebranding of the Eachine E58. For some reason, it stopped spinning. I can turn it on, the lights will blink, but when I try to engage it with my controller, there's no reaction.

I was never able to get this to work with my phone, or else I would try it there to eliminate the possibility that the controller stopped working. I thought I read somewhere that the battery can become charged improperly, or a cell will go dead, causing the drone to turn on but not take off. I'm not sure, but if anyone could help me troubleshoot this, I would appreciate it.

 

[publicradio]

Bumping. I bought a new battery for this unit, and it's the same problem. It blinks slowly when I turn it on, and that's all it does. The remote beeps when I push the throttle up then down, which is what it's supposed to do. But nothing happens. There's a solid red light under the unit.

 

[wafflejock]

Hiya so no experience with that particular model. In general the toy grade quads will run off 1S or 2S battery a 1S battery is 1 lithium cell which has a max charged voltage of 4.2V and a minimum voltage usually at 3.0V but when pulling power from the battery the voltage dips so most pilots land when cells are at 3.6V or 3.7V per cell so as to not risk pulling the voltage down below 3.0V for an extended period of time (more amp draw causes the voltage of the cells to dip temporarily until the amp draw is removed and the battery will recover some voltage once resting).

Long story short get a multimeter or voltmeter and measure the DC voltage of the battery it should be 4.2V per cell when charged and should really never be below 3.0V per cell for lithium based stuff.

It could be some other issues though ultimately it's hard to diagnose with any proprietary devices especially, but in any case would need oscilloscope etc. to probe further on this black box. There are tons of flight controllers that support betaflight or other open source firmwares (iNav I think butterflight, cleanflight, etc.) With those can use the terminal and connection over USB to computer to diagnose and fix things many times but with proprietary gear it's just a matter of probing electrical parts or inspecting physical connections to figure out how a thing is working or where a signal is getting dropped.

 

[publicradio]

So I'm pretty positive mine is an eachine e58. If I search for this on Amazon, the results say 'Emotion Drone' on them. So it must be a rebrand.

Regarding the battery: I bought a new, replacement battery and the result was identical. So I don't think it's the battery.

Is it possible that all four motors burned out at the same time? I will buy new motors if this would fix the problem, but if it's unlikely they would also stop at the same time, then I won't bother.

 

[wafflejock]

Yah super unlikely to be simultaneous failure it's just something with the receiver input or the flight controller almost definitely (control link related or otherwise software/firmware issue on flight controller it sounds like). Brushless motors last a very very long time any sort of brushed motors or motors with gears will wear down a lot quicker but simultaneous failure of four motors is highly unlikely even in that case. I'd guess just something needs to be factory reset if that's possible (maybe a small button on the controller or on the quad on the flight controller or body of the quad but hard to say)

Flight controller (FC) is a small circuit board on the quad that checks for level and gets control input from the receiver and tells motor speed controller circuitry how fast to run each motor to achieve flight. From description sounds like your transmitter/controller in your hand is getting some signal to the receiver and is in turn communicating with the FC to get it to react at all, but fact that it doesn't fully arm/fly must be an issue with the FC.