Camera keeps stopping

I have been having intermittent problems with the camera stopping (R2A) after about 1-2 minutes.
It typically happens about 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 flights. All the LiDAR data will be there but only about 25-40 pictures.

I am on all the latest firmware.
I always format the USB as per instructions.
I always shut off the wifi and start the unit manually.

This makes most operations take at least 2x as long as they should because I have to re-do segments all the time.

To be honest. I have never had a reliable experience with the R2A. It’s been back for repairs twice and I have never been able to rely on it enough to leave a job before uncompressing and processing the RTK at least.

We are just about to enter our busiest season and have several jobs lined up in the next few weeks. Yesterday was a total fail. We had a corridor operation of about 20km. This should have been a 3 flight operation.

The first leg worked as it should. The second leg worked fine. Then on the 3rd, the camera stopped. We spent the rest of the day charging batteries and running flights but all were the same. The camera would stop within the first few minutes and of course there’s no way to know until we land the drone and sadly the camera isn’t running.

It’s like an awful lottery. Every time I touch down I’m terrified to approach an not hear clicking.

Is yours the original R2A, or the snappier R2A no strings version?

Hello, DroneCanada! We will continue to assist you via the Support Ticket you created with the ROCK Support Team. Thank you!

We had an original, but we experienced some issues and it was replaced with a No-strings version after some strange problems.

I have had 2 successful flights with a different USB stick now. The original USB doesn’t seem to have anything wrong with it and still performs fine on a PC diagnostic R/W test etc.
This is an intermittent problem so we’ll have to see. Problem is, we’re booked every day there’s good enough weather to fly so it’s hard to find time to test.

I was able to finish my project from the other day by colourizing the point cloud in Metashape using photos taken on another run. Luckily the colour alignment isn’t that important on this job. It turned out surprisingly well though!

We had an issue with it the first run when we got ours but otherwise no issues with ours!

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