We have had a strange occurrence with the Cube Orange (as many others have, unfortunately), which resulted in a catastrophic failure. So far we are pretty clueless when it comes to issue and none of the known problems seem to be related.
Some of the stats:
- Firmware: v1.11.3
- Hardware: Cube Orange + ADSB breakout
- Power supply: Mauch 4-14S Backup BEC for Pixhawk 2
- 39 flights
- 10+ hour flight time
Before the flight, there were communication issue with peripheral hardware (I2C, CAN). This is something we can reproduce by powering up the system with low current restriction, but that was not the case. (this should have been a red flag but it wasn’t apparently)
The logger restarted itself twice, without a particular reason, according to the debug messages and log messages.
In the 3rd log, it shows the vehicle doing the following:
- Armed motors for 90 seconds (don’t ask me why, the pilots don’t remember this but both the AP log as telemetry log show this)
- Position control hover for 76 seconds
- Mission start → climb to transition altitude 15 seconds
- Transition to FWF start 1 second
After that point the logging stops on both the AP log, and there are no more updates on the telemetry messages (and the machine plummets out of the sky).
Batteries at 84% SOC, around 23.6V with the power draw, so the vehicle should have had plenty of juice to power itself, yet it seems like it turned itself off entirely. No kill commands were send, no odd RC inputs, no other messages recorded.
One of our assumptions was the overloading of the breakout board’s power supply, since we have a lot of peripherals, but even shorting the power did not cause in the failure of the AP PSU.
Anyone have had similar issues or experiences?
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