Before I buy any new products from this company. Can I ask question?
Are they have a life time intentionaly limited to 3 years or just poor quality?
I have several black cubes arround 3,5years old and the keep failing togheter with Here 2/3 GPSs.
Just for fun we use as replacement of failed black cubes and here GPSs a combination of 7years old Pixhawk 2.4.8 with M8N GPSs. Thez work flawlessly even after many years. Im not sure now to buy more products from here or not bcs its quite huge investment and only for a few years not worth. Or you have a serious quality problem?
Thanks for answers if I get some. But probably not so at least its a warning for visitors here.
We used a lot of Cubes black for years without any issue. Some of our clients reach around 700hours of flight every year, and are still using the same FC hardware since they received their drone.
You can simply been unlucky, or it can comes from its environement (power supplies, peripherals, …)
Cubepilot takes the business seriously, so do not worry about the quality.
We have many orange cubes in service with no issues.
But recently the black ones are very unreliable. Specially the CAN and getting “Unhealthy AHRS”, after complete reinstalling of the FW it works a limited time and fail again. Luck/Unluck is not really an answer bcs on payload time to time we have cameras for 10Keuro and thats a bit an unsure feeling than.
Back to here 2/3 we traced back the problem to cubes. The GPS work fine. The problem is caused by the CAN. It make weird things like if one port is occupied its not working but if two it works and etc… this was not happening before. On FW 4.3 it happens less. I undrestand Black is EOL but to buy something for few years than it comes to EOL and it become useless is a bit problem and we have to upgrade for hundreds of euro/piece. With drone fleet ±20pcs it is expensive.
But juding from some discussions over internet Im sure the problem is not on us same things happening also with other operators. Thats why I need to clarify this bcs than is cheaper to go alternative way.
Regarding power supplies and etc… We strictly adhere to use only their products bcs we dont want experiment with expensive equipement. 3rd party equipement is used only on UARTS. As precaution we use optocouplers where its practical, independent power supplies and etc… So about enviroment I dont think so there is an issue.
Considering the reputation we have of supporting our customers with 8-9 year old hardware… I struggle to imagine what benefits we would get from planning failures!
Moving on…
Where are your logs from the good boots?
Where are your logs from the failed startups?
Where are your logs from the recovery cube?
Where are the logs? Lost bcs one of the troubleshooting step we made loaded rover FW and deleted the SD card content. There was ocasions that helped. Also we traced back that the failed units there are currently 2 and we recovered another 2 to longtime storage. Mean the copter was not flying prolonged time, but stored in airconditioned storage.
Where are your logs from the good boots? - for now lost we will try to get them on next failure acasion
Where are your logs from the failed startups? for now lost we will try to get them on next failure acasion
Where are your logs from the recovery cube? - I will download them today.
What firmware? - anything above 4.3 causing failures after few cycles the 4.3 appears to be now stable on recovered units.
What ground controller software? - Mission planner only latest version only. Or herelink there is GCS.
To be clear we know what we are doing.We do also development on SW/FW but Im not complaining about these situations. All failures are now traced back to long term storage. With orange cubes we had not single failure. But what is driving me crazy is the unsure situation what if it happens later also with them.