This weekend was not good to me. I had planned to take my Vortex 285 out for a spin, but ever since the "spanish moss" incident, I've had a problem with the on-screen display where the boot-up text won't go away when you arm the craft. It's kinda hard to fly when you have a full screen of text blocking your view! Also, the alert tones are going nuts now. As soon as the board boots up and the receiver links with the transmitter, I get this rising and falling series of alarm tones. Like 5 notes up, then the same 5 notes back down, on a cycle of about 2 seconds or so. And the LEDs on the back are all flashing white.
I sent an e-mail to ImmersionRC asking for help, but evidently their customer support department is notoriously slow about replying. (Still haven't gotten an answer to a question I sent them 10 days ago!) So I figured I would try re-flashing the firmware to see if that helps.
Several hours later (after I had run out of patience and profanity), I decided that the all-in-one flight controller / on-screen display board is toast. Kept getting errors when trying to flash the board, which is definitely not a good thing. (Crap!) Guess I'm going to have to replace the Vortex Fusion flight controller. Thinking about going with the Gen2 board that they use on the newer Vortex 250 though, because it's a better controller. 70 bucks though - ouch!
So since it was obvious that I wouldn't be flying the Vortex, I thought I would break out my old 250 racing quad and give that one a go. It's running the old CC3D controller, and I knew I wanted to switch the receiver over to my new radio, so I tried to link up the Openflight (now Libreflight) software with my controller to make the change. Hah! First thing it wanted to do is update the firmware. I should have known...
Given my previous experience with the Vortex, I really didn't want to do anymore firmware flashing this weekend, but it wouldn't connect until I updated, so in the end I gave it a shot. And what do you know? "Bootloader Failure"! AAAAAAAAAUGH!
So now I have two dead quads, and a bunch of fully-charged lipo batteries that I'm going to need to drain back to storage voltage soon. Sigh.
Guess I need to order TWO new flight controllers. Thinking about getting the Omnibus F4 for my older racing quad since it includes a barometer for altitude info, but for the Vortex I'm going to need to get the Fusion board from them if I want to be able to just plug and play. Just gotta figure out if the Gen 2 board will work with my old 285 Vortex...
Damn. Would have been a nice weekend for flying. Oh well. Time to spend some more money...
Adam