Karma refusing to pair - Reverse engineering investigation

[Ironspear]

I am in process of getting myself geared up once more to fly my Karma drone again. After a couple of years of moving and getting settled down on the Eastern shore of Canada in Nova Scotia. To get the pairing system working again I am going to try pairing in three stages, first pairing the drone body on its own without stabiliser and camera, if that works, \i will add the stabiliser without the camera. If that works I will add the camera. If they all work I will go out on my deck and fly my drone once more.
I am open to any thoughts and suggestions.

Hiya James!

Great to hear from you again mate. Luckily I seem to have avoided the "Karma fiasco".

Great idea to try out. I dont think I have read on here that anyone has tried that.

Good luck.

"Hoots mun! What's made ye move tae New Scotland"? (said in my best Scottish accent)

Hope you have settled in nicely.

Take care mate.

 

[James Hatch]

Great to hear from you Ironspear!
I now have more room here which to fly my drones the two of them, no airports and city buildings. So I will take it step by step, and will publish my results as we progress.
The Karma is still being produced in China and there is an outlet based here in Canada.
At the present I have two complete drones and spare parts, So I am not interested in making any purchases.
Keep your drones flying and getting great photos of the Murray River!
Jim Hatch.

 

[Ironspear]

Great to hear from you Ironspear!
I now have more room here which to fly my drones the two of them, no airports and city buildings. So I will take it step by step, and will publish my results as we progress.
The Karma is still being produced in China and there is an outlet based here in Canada.
At the present I have two complete drones and spare parts, So I am not interested in making any purchases.
Keep your drones flying and getting great photos of the Murray River!
Jim Hatch.

Hello.
It's interesting that they are still sold out of China.
I thought they had all gone.
Great to know you can still get them.
Especially just the core.

ciao

 

[dronelover]

Any update on this thread?

 

[Ironspear]

Has anyone bought one of these Chinese cores?

 

[dronelover]

There mus be a way that gopro at factory are able to feed firmware into these cores wothout the help of the controller.
I cant imagine otherwise the time and effort to do all these things via wifi controller.

 

[aldous]

Anyone try? Link: GoPro Karma | Facebook

 

[Ironspear]

Not heard any mention about changing these batteries before. I may be wrong though. It sounds like a great logical idea. Definitely worth a try. Good luck mate. Please keep us posted.

 

[MiragePro]

It would be an easy experiment, without doing any further damage. I would do it.

 

[dronelover]

Please do it.


Hopefully this will also fix the pairing issues alot of us have.


Thanks for contributing

 

[Heiko Klein]

das eine Akku war bei mir runter - nach dem Austausch änderte sich aber nichts

 

[aldous]

company in France repairing karmas.

Solving the Drone Karma® Pairing Problem – ValorConseilCalvados

valorconseilcalvados.com

facebook group about gopro karma problems, sometimes, there're interesting informations.

GoPro (broken) Karma Pilots | Facebook

GoPro Karma was a great value for money drone until GoPro has pushed a mandatory software update that has "bricked" most of them. There was an option to replace Karma Drone "core" if you were a...

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source:

Facebook

www.facebook.com

 

[Schick2583]

I don’t know if you have looked into it or not, but if the battery pack is faulty it will cause the gimbal and camera to no be recognized for some reason. I have a video showing a good battery where everything works fine then a “bad” battery and the gimbal and camera won’t turn on. I’ve also noticed recently with my 1 karma, (I have 6 of them) that certain battery packs also won’t allow the karma to connect to the camera and controller but if I swap it out with another one it works fine. I think there’s an issue with the batteries that’s causing a lot of the pairing issues for some reason. The hero 7 black also causes issues since it was designed for the 4, 5 & 6 and the 7 was just a firmware update. Hopefully some of this helps in some way, I’ll be following your post.

 

[dronelover]

I don’t know if you have looked into it or not, but if the battery pack is faulty it will cause the gimbal and camera to no be recognized for some reason. I have a video showing a good battery where everything works fine then a “bad” battery and the gimbal and camera won’t turn on. I’ve also noticed recently with my 1 karma, (I have 6 of them) that certain battery packs also won’t allow the karma to connect to the camera and controller but if I swap it out with another one it works fine. I think there’s an issue with the batteries that’s causing a lot of the pairing issues for some reason. The hero 7 black also causes issues since it was designed for the 4, 5 & 6 and the 7 was just a firmware update. Hopefully some of this helps in some way, I’ll be following your post.

Yes. I saw a video from youtube where a guy caught a fishing line and crashed the drone into the lake.

Everything worked fine but he needed everything to be dry.

The original battery that crashed into the laked made his gimbal and camera to not turn on. But he also had ordered a new battery and that made gimbal/camera to work perfectly.


I also have a second karma drone that would not pair.

I have a total of 4 batteries including the one that came with the unpairing drone.

NONE of the 4 batteries work on the none pairing drone but all four works on my first fully flying karma drone.


Some people also got replacement batteries from gopro but reports says it didnt work for them.

At this point, its pointless and expensive to put more money on this system and becomes a guessing game.

 

[MiragePro]

Very interesting piece on what makes this drone fail. Especially about the NAND memory becoming corrupted. I personally thought that it might because the downloading process might have been interrupted and corrupted the memory. Good piece of knowledge to know. Fortunately I have only updated mine once and plan on not having any more updates.

 

[guipsot]

Has anyone bought one of these Chinese cores?

Has anyone bought one of these Chinese cores?

I have bought one and indeed work, well actually I am in China, and got it from the second hand products, the app is called Idle Fish.

 

[adz648]

On another thread someone has pointed out a potential pattern.
I left my drone with a battery and the GoPro still connected. The karma drained all the batteries and since then won’t pair.
My drone has the usual issue of the stabiliser not starting.

Does that help?

 

[llllBarsllll]

Hello,
I have the same problem with boot. Is any updates with this fix? I could not find Karma "body" firmware anywhere.

 

[kamil.janiszewski]

Hello everyone! Have you got any progress in this point? What about this small cmos battery? Is it possible that it can fix the booting problem??

 

[moher4]

not sure if anyone here is still around but i recently bought a used karma drone and ran into the pairing issue where the drone turns on but wont connect to the controller or even turn off when i hold the power button, i tried everything on youtube and forms but non really helped so i put it back into its case and left it for like 24 horus with the battery in it and gave it a try again and it just worked so i took it out and flew it around and then tried to put in a new battery to fly some more and the same issue started again. I noticed that when the controller won't pair the gimble will for some reason just not work or turn on the camera but when the gimble works and the camera turns on everything works fine. I left the drone to sit for about an hour after i flew it with the fresh battery in it and when i went to start it hold and behold it worked again so i turned it off using the button and back on again and the pairing problem started again along with the gimble and camera not working so i started repeating this and it kept only working after 1 hour then after a couple of tries it started working after 30mins then 20 then 18 (for some reason never at 15mins) but now its down to a 6min wait but now i can swap the battery between flights as long as i do it in less than 10 seconds i can also now turn on the drone and off as much as i want. im not sure if this is isolated to just me or if it is something that might work for everyone but it's here hope this helps some if not all