CrazyFile bolt disconnect

[maichongju]

this problem happens from time to time and I cannot reproduce it. After the bolt takes off, sometimes it will just stop and drop from the air. It did not call back any disconnect function from the cflib. From the bolt itself, I can see the connection light is no longer visible. But the red light is flashing twice a second which should indicate is ready to fly. But then if I try to connect the bolt again, it won't connect to it. It will just be stuck at request connection setup unless I restart the bolt.

Because there isn't any feedback from the drone about why did it disconnect. Therefore it is hard for me to find out what is causing this.

Just wondering if anyone has experienced this issue before? If so, how should I find out what is causing the disconnection?

[krichardsson]

Which version of the firmware are you using?

[maichongju]

The firmware was a custom compile version of the 2022.05. We only change the PID value and some other settings. None logic change or update.
I just saw that there is a new firmware 2022.09. Perhaps I should try the new firmware and see if the issue still exist.

[krichardsson]

It sounds like your NRF might have crashed, but I'm not sure.

We are currently investigating intermittent problems on the syslink. Syslink is the link between the NRF and STM CPUs and we have seen issues such as lost packets and that one of the CPUs might halt. Versions 2022.05 and 2022.09 are pretty stable as far as we know and the problems have mainly been seen in versions in-between. As you used 2022.05 it should be very unlikely.

How often does it happen to you?
What does your set up looks like, decks and so on?

The NRF handles radio communication and forwards the packets to the STM via syslink. USB on the other hand is connected directly to the STM and USB communication does not use syslink.

To investigate this further I hope you could make a test when you are in this state next time. I would like you to try to connect to the Crazyflie via USB instead of the radio. It a USB connection works it would indicate that the STM still is OK, but the NRF is dead or syslink is not working.

You could try to 2022.09 as well. We have made a small change related to syslink that possibly could make a difference.

[maichongju]

I have built the firmware with the latest 2022.09 but the issue still exists.

the issue happens from time to time. Sometimes 1 in every 10 flights. But sometimes more often.

When the drone is in that state, I plug the drone via USB and the PC can recognize the drone. So I believe then the STM is ok.

[krichardsson]

This sounds like it could be the NRF, we have not seen it that much in 2022.09 though.
We need more information about your set up to be able to help you further.

[maichongju]

Sure. What kind of information do you need?

We are running the bolt with three decks, flow deck, loco deck and the multi-ranger.

Software: cflib-0.1.20.1, python 3.10

[maichongju]

I do have quite a bit of log register to it. that might be the issue. So here is the setup I have.

1. Battery Logger ( BatteryLevel, BatteryVoltage,BatteryState), update every 100ms
2. Core logger ( Pitch, roll, yaw)update every 10ms
3. MotorThrustLogger(Core_thrust,M1,M2,M3,M4) update every 250ms
4. multiRangerLogger(Front,left,right,rear,down) update every 10ms
5. PositionLogger(stateEstimate.x,stateEstimate.y,stateEstimate.z) update every 10ms
6. LocoLogger(locoMode), update every 100ms

My client is sending commands to the drone around 9 times per second.

[tobbeanton]

Sorry for a late reply and it's been to busy to try to replicate the problem. Hopefully we will find some time soon.

[wdliu356]

Hi, is there any update here? I think I'm facing the same problem but using bigquad deck though. Is it the large amount of logging that caused such problem?

[tobbeanton]

Have you managed to replicate the problem on a normal Crazyfie?

[wdliu356]

I'm now working on large quad so maybe I can try with the bolt first. Finally got my bolt delivered. But based on my experiment before, I didn't meet this problem when working with normal crazyflie.