I recently bought a new Cube, Black, Standard edition from IR-Lock out of Georgia and received a bad Cube. When I contacted the company about this they told me it was an old serial number and should not have been in their inventory. Now, I don’t trust the Cube or the inventory from IR-Lock.
My question is, "How reliable are the Cube Flight Controllers?
Rick
Wonder how it slipped through the cracks, what was bad about it, I know there were some issues awhile ago and some issues in the first batch about over tightening the screw which would make one of the pins stop working. Did you plug it in and get a warning from MP?
Did you purchase directly from IRLock? Or from Amazon?
Amazon has a terrible reputation of mixing stock.
Either way, what was wrong with your cube? Sounds like IRLOCK are helping you, is there anything else you need help with?
I bought it directly from IR-Lock and they didn’t have any idea how that one got into their inventory.
At first, when I loaded the firmware, it seemed to work alright until I unplugged it from the USB and plugged in the power brick. That’s when the Pixhawk turned into a brick itself. I got 2 pop-ups saying there was service bulletins issued for this device and an error message in MP saying the board would not initialize and neither would the Here2 GPS I bought along with the controller. To bad too. I was looking forward to trying out the 2.1 on a video platform I’m working on.
At first, when I loaded the firmware, it seemed to work alright until I unplugged it from the USB and plugged in the power brick. That’s when the Pixhawk turned into a brick itself. I got 2 pop-ups saying there was service bulletins issued for this device and an error message in MP saying the board would not initialize and neither would the Here2 GPS I bought along with the controller. To bad too. I was looking forward to trying out the 2.1 on a video platform I’m working on.
Thomas @ IR-Lock is very good about solving issues like this. I have 3 Cube Blacks a s 1 Cube Blue. I flown then on planes for up to two hours at a time and many miles at a time for hundreds of hours. I have never lost one.
Yeah that popup is there to tell you that particular Cube might be affected by Service Bulletin 02, which means that one of the IMUs may stop working. They will certainly replace it.
Cubes generally are very reliable, especially when combined with smart software. In fact, it’s possible to fly a “bad” SB02 Cube safely with Ardupilot, since the Cube has 3 IMUs and Ardupilot will failover to a healthy one in the event of a failure. But it’s best to replace it anyways in order to keep that extra margin of safety.
They take safety quite seriously and the service bulletins themselves are evidence of this - other manufacturers don’t even bother to notify users of manufacturing defects.
Exactly.
We prefer to err on the side of caution, that’s why we have that message and ground your cube.
+1 on Thomas from IR Lock. He is really great - I am sure he will get you sorted in no time!