Neil Clennan ~ my personal website

Drone Repairs

After 4 days of fun, my drone ran into technical difficulties. After it failed halfway through a flip, it developed difficulties with takeoffs. It would start upward, veer off to one side, then either land immediately, or crash into something. I tried rebooting both the drone and the phone app, but that that didn’t fix it. I let it sit for a day, then contacted their tech support via chat.

The technician who assisted me had me check to make sure the app and firmware were up to date, which they were, then had me recalibrate the IMU (Internal Measurement Unit). After that, he started the process for having me send it in for repair.

On my own, I took one additional troubleshooting step. I reset the drone’s settings back to the factory defaults. Unfortunately, when I tested the drone after that, it failed by crashing and lost one propeller and damaged to another.

When tech support learned that my malfunction had happened within the first week of owning it, they informed me that my warranty qualified me for full product replacement. I just needed to send back the product with all accessories included. When I informed them that one prop was damaged and another was missing, they told me we have to go back to the repair option. That kind of pissed me off because the prop damage and flinging off occurred while testing due to the original malfunction. I did a thorough search and found the missing prop. I sent them another message telling them that I would be including it and expected to go back to the replacement option.

The message I got back sounded almost as if they hadn’t read the message I sent them. They said we could go ahead with the replacement option, and there was no need to include the lost prop if I can’t find it. Strange.

Anyway, I FedExed the whole thing to them, so now I just have to wait for the replacement.

By the way, I did get to play with the new controller before the failure. It arrived on the same day as the failure.

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