I just bought a used Oxi 3 Heli which came with a Spirit 1FBL, and I have a weird problem.

When I plug the battery in, the spirit initializes, then it sets the swash plate tilted forward, as if the elevator was pushed all the way forward. Moreover, I don't hear any of the ESC initialization beeps. The ESC is initialized, because if I take it of throttle hold it spins up.

If I turn the heli on (plug the power in, with the throttle stick all they way up and throttle hold off, as if I was calibrating the throttle, the ESC initializes correctly, and when I put the throttle stick back down, the swash levels out. from this point on, it seems to work OK, until I power it off, then I have to go through the same process all over again.

The ESC is a 40A HobbyWing Platinum v4, and the Spirit FBL has been flashed to the latest firmware. It uses a DSMx Satellite receiver. The ESC is set to Governor/Stor mode. The Throttle setting in the Spirit are default.

Any ideas why I'm having this issue? Is the swash plate forward initialization something unique to the ESC or the DSM satellite?

Hello,
have you looked in Spirit Settings in the flight log ? If the heli initializes in this way that you discribed there is maybe an entry in the flight log - you should look into Log viewer before you are flying again because there is with absolute certainty an rlevant entry present -

Regards
Matthias

I never did check the flight logs, but after flying it with the original setup this past weekend, I tried a couple of things to see if this is a ESC issue or a FBL issue.

It turns out it was a receiver/DSMx Satellite issue. If I pulled the satellite out of the FBL, the Spirit could initialize properly on its own, with the swash plate level. As soon as I'd plug the satellite back in, it would initialize with the swash tilted forward. I don't know if something was wrong with it, or there was some setting I'm not familiar with, but I tried a whole bunch of things including resetting the failsafe settings, yet nothing helped.

As long as I went through the initialization process I mentioned before (throttle @ max) while powering it up, the it would work fine, and I flew 3 battery packs without any issues. But I still wanted telemetry, so to that end, I replaced the DSMX with an FrSky Archer RS, and the strange swash behavior is gone. I also replaced the Hobbywing Platinum ESC with a Castle Edge Lite 50.

Hi,
that sounds for me that your gas paths were never taught - If you connect the battery with throttle in maximum position the esc should beep and then you should set the throttle back to minimum but in the normal way your throttle has to be in minimum - so far I haven't had any problems with hobbywing esc's regarding telemetry and correct initialization -
The fact is that the Spirit initializes correctly even without a receiver - but I still think that there was something wrong in the previous configuration -



https://manual.spirit-system.com/index.php?title=Problems_and_Solutions


Regards
Matthias

I think that you will need to set ESC throttle range properly either in the ESC itself or you can do this by changing Minimum and Maximum values in the Throttle/Governor window.

_________________
Spirit System developer

"that sounds for me that your gas paths were never taught - If you connect the battery with throttle in maximum position the esc should beep and then you should set the throttle back to minimum but in the normal way your throttle has to be in minimum "

Actually, the problem is that the ESC doesn't seem to store the end points, which is why I have to do it every time I power it up. I've never had any issues with HobbyWing ESC either. Personally I don't think there was anything wrong with the ESC, I think all the issues were related to the Spektrum satellite.

Unfortunately, it's too late to recover those older logs now. I checked the current logs and they're all clean, this is the last one

After I switched to the Castle ESC, I have no more problems.