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Evo 2 midair firmware crash? 2.5.0

Andrew01

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Earlier this morning I went out for a flight, the location was a bit more windy than expected, so I turned on ludicrous mode in case the gusts got higher. This was the first time I ever had a need to do so, always sticking well within obstacle avoidance land.

After locking 10 sats I took off and sat at a hover (the usual 3 to 4 feet or so) and began validating my camera setting as I always do. Then came the surprise.

With no input on the rc, the aircraft lost all propulsion and dropped out of the air, luckily upright and as far as I can tell directly onto the landing gear. The rc lost connection at the same time. Immediately after hitting the ground, I hear the Evo 2's startup sound and the gimbal swivel check occurs. The rc relinked and I got self checking warnings like I had just turned it on. miraculously, no damage to the gimbal or the fuselage has been found so far. But as far as I'm concerned, it's grounded...

I can't be sure, but it appears as if the firmware experienced something similar to a blue screen and rebooted mid-air, losing all propulsion and connectivity in the middle of it.

This is when I also noticed no flights have been logged in the past 4 days, at least 10 are missing including this one. So unfortunately I don't have the hard data to share unless something shows up in the app later...

Anyone seen any reports of anything like this before?
 
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The safety implications of this and other reports of the E2 on firmware 2.5.0 are concerning.
 
Update - after rebooting the phone and relaunching explorer / doing a pull to refresh, the log did appear. Still others missing but glad to have this one. Here's a recording:



Some initial observations:
-altitude is slightly off VS real height to launch point, but may be correct to ground level. I was on a wooden boardwalk over a marsh

-sats reported in the log is 8 and dropped to 7, 10 observed onscreen during the (brief) flight... Hmm

-at around t=8sec, I turn the drone to face the bridge I was planning to shoot to ensure camera settings were good.

-at around t=12 I had begun setting exposure, log appears to freeze. A few seconds later the aircraft dropped, and it was not logged (would make sense if it was busy rebooting I guess)

-around t=19, the aircraft altitude in log instantly changes to 0 feet and logging appears to resume for a brief moment. The GPS appears to be resetting as you can see a sudden loss of precision. The aircraft never actually left the launch point.

-there is no record beyond here, even though the drone was powered for another minute or two while I was checking it. Spun up the rotors on the ground before powering down, that wasn't recorded.

Sycned this log and will be reaching out to autel today to report...
 
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Yeah. It was properly seated and secure before the flight during the usual pre checks, and still secure after the fall.

Unable to reach autel so far but will keep trying...
 
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Got through to support after 6 or 7 attempts. The drone itself has internal flight logs onboard, which require proprietary software to read and they want the drone and rc to do so. Turnaround time is 6 weeks, not thrilled about that but agree it's best for the whole community to understand this as it's a potentially serious flight safety issue. I scanned the aircraft's (user facing) internal storage myself for hidden bin files or the like, nothing visible in the file system.

When pressed on the problems we've seen with 2.5.0, and repeated pointing to the issues we've found here on the forums, they made it clear there is no interest in reading or following the forums, which to me, as a full stack developer supporting thousands of users on enterprise systems, says they're not engaged or listening enough to their users - this isn't really much effort. Opportunities being lost.

I asked for a rough order of magnitude as to when the next update is scheduled, no information is known is the answer I got.
 
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When pressed on the problems we've seen with 2.5.0, and repeated pointing to the issues we've found here on the forums, they made it clear there is no interest in reading or following the forums, which to me, as a full stack developer supporting thousands of users on enterprise systems, says they're not engaged or listening enough to their users - this isn't really much effort. Opportunities being lost.

I asked for a rough order of magnitude as to when the next update is scheduled, no information is known is the answer I got.

Amateur hour at Autel! Over three weeks with flawed firmware and no sense of urgency on the part of Autel. Pretty decent hardware held back by lack luster software and lack of effective problem resolution. At this rate I don't think DJI's market share is in any danger from Autel.
 
Amateur hour at Autel! Over three weeks with flawed firmware and no sense of urgency on the part of Autel. Pretty decent hardware held back by lack luster software and lack of effective problem resolution. At this rate I don't think DJI's market share is in any danger from Autel.
This has gone on for years now. It started with the XSP with false promises (accessories, gimbal options, SDK release) and now not providing batteries. The new EVO owners kept telling the XSP owners to quit whining and deal with an out dated drone when we were trying to tell them what was going on before they got into Autel. Then with the EVO 1 without even being finished with updates and none to be seen for quite a while now. Only updates in the app has been for the EVO 2. Now all this mess with the firmware update. They have made some bad mistakes. Unfortunately they could have done a lot better with better decisions. They nailed it with customer service is all.
 
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This is concerning to say the least, but I have not seen widespread reports of this, so that is a good thing. Whenever you ask support about firmware....they probably roll their eyes, since they probably don't talk to the dev team very much, and they probably don't have the time to read forums. Small company, and they don't pay shills to monitor forums like DJI did...they cut them all loose now. This is why you don't see many DJI Shills posting anymore defending DJI non-stop. No more monies in it.
Thank you for agreeing to send in your drone. Lets hope the turn around time is not as long as they say. No one wants drones dropping out of the sky.
 

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