Troubleshooting Quadcopter Vibration

I diagnose some vibration in my camera(s), then use the Motors tab to figure out which motors are likely to be causing it. Finally, I tear down the motor and check it out.

[@JoshuaBardwell]

In the interest of full disclosure, I should let you know that none of this changed the vibration characteristics of the motor. There was a tiny bit of vertical slop in the shaft, so I also loosened the grub screws and used a C clamp to press the shaft in about 0.5mm to tighten that up. That didn't fix it either. Given that I can find no major mechanical issues with the motor, and given that the motor's vibration is less than my 0.10 G threshold for "definitely too much", I am going to go searching for other things. For one thing, I am going to put four brand new props on all at once and see if maybe I just had a bad prop from the factory. Anyway, I hope that this video is helpful even if it didn't actually fix my problem this time.

[@JoshuaBardwell]

+Rob B Definitely worth a look.

[@pieterdenisebloem2448]

joshua, vibration can also be caused by lose parts. the bearing that was falling out is not correct. this causes hermonic like vibration (high freq noise). it seems like there whas a crack in the base of the motor from the bearing bore to the out side. are you still flying this motor ?

[@JoshuaBardwell]

Pieter Denise Bloem You have very sharp eyes to notice that mark. I took the motor apart again to double-check, and what you are seeing is either a scratch in the paint or a milling mark. But there is no crack.

[@pieterdenisebloem2448]

+Joshua Bardwell, thats good news! still the bearing should have a press fit. (when your motors heat up the housing expands en there will be no clamping of the bearing at all and starts to move causing fibration) as you mentioned it is for now a acceptable amount of vibration. but over time this can get worse. hoop this helps you :)

[@sikzTnyn]

What should i do if i have horrible vibrations past 50% throttle in my qav210 using lux fc. I have no idea if its my motors escs or my lux fc cuz when i test the motors tab 2 of the motors die down to low rpm when i bring the quad to full throttle.

[@ThePromptWizard2023]

Amazing. Using Cleanflight I tested each motor and found which had vibrations via those numbers. You said .03 is good, and over 0.1 is bad in the video I think. One of my motors has @ a 0.2, good show sir! Oddly enough, I never saw the vibration in the video, rather it was audio from my HD camera that clued me in.

[@JoshuaBardwell]

+Dragonsbane777 I would say that 0.2 with prop off is definitely indicative of a mechanical issue worth digging into.

[@Hoverbot1TV]

Liquid soap and a toothbrush works for washing out the bell. Axis can determine if the c clip groove is bad or the bell has shifted up resulting in play up and down. A bent shaft will effect the side to side axis. Great vid thanks,

[@eroticmasterbaker]

You forgot to say im gonna learn something today

[@gusf8451]

I know this an old video , but betaflight now doesn't have accelo graph in the motor tab it's a gyro graph instead and it's very twitchy and we cannot reset it, do you know of any other way of testing motors, I have a very bad vibration and suspect the motors.

[@JoshuaBardwell]

Blackbox I guess. It's a shame they changed that. I'm not sure if it's a bug or on purpose.

[@williamnichols2067]

I have a spare cf rod and mount plate. I also have a benchtop bldc 24v motor driver variable speed. I attach the motor to the spare mount and rod. Hold the rod with my hand and spin it up, prop off of course, and feel if its out of balance. But this is usually for spare off the quad motors.

[@SvPVids]

thanks for the help, the vibrations where so intense that it would vibrate the usb connector out and keep the motors running

[@davidgeemuthafuka]

my my my... How far you have come along Mr. Bardwell. :)

[@hunterssports]

Just watched this, its ok, but I feel its unfinished and a bit out dated now from 2016. One chap stated in his comments, from his bad english and I would like to agree with him, as im a former mechanic from the 80s, that we used to have similar issues with turbo chargers and balance issues if the bearings were to loose in either the housing or on shaft. The fact the you stated the bearings were replaced and issue remained? was either the gap in microns between bearing and rotor housing, or the gap on the shaft inside the bearing, as suggested use loctite on bearings outer surface inserted into rotor housing to reduce clearance, or possibly on the commutators shaft, this was noticed when your bearing kept falling out of its location. Similar things would happen in gearboxes and automatic transmissions. Its the clearance basically that allows for this to happen. The bearing is there to do the work, but if there is microns in clearance the bearing is relieved of its duties and hence the vibes. Oh and if the clearances are corrected or are ok, the only other logical area is the spinning mass is out of balance.

[@williamnichols2067]

Those type of clips hold alot better than the thin ring types. But are more of a pita to get on and off.

[@maxdessureault]

I get up to 0.17 on two of the motors.. (they have about a month of flying on them) guess which one.. 2 and 3. bearing in the motor 2 were shot (which is weird) so I replaced them. Vibration is still there, less present but too much for my liking. bells look good, shaft too. one interesting thing, the motors that are vibrating are the one with crossed wires on the esc, so just to make sure I unsoldered the wires, wired them straight and inversed the rotation in blheli, same thing, they still vibrate. I have some aikon sefm on the way from rotorgeeks, i'll give them a go to see if it changes something

[@Txarames]

The "gap" btw the stator and the rotor must be flat during the 360º. In my case this does not happen and it oscilates. If you remove the stator "the bell" and you spin it faster on the table over the main shaft where the propeller nut is, I saw it was also oscilating. This means that the stator is damage probably bacause of combinations like: 1- Crash 2- Heat 3- Very hard hard propeller does not absorv very well the hits as softer propellers. So if you are moving for a good quality propeller your probabilities to damage the stator or even the bearings are quite high. Correct way is to mount new motors and save "good" parts from damage motors.

[@birdwing98]

10:02 You dislodge a bit of magnetic stone from between magnets, but it remains stuck to a magnets face. Yes, in certain locations, some of the grit and gravel has enough iron to be attracted to the magnets. Have you ever flown that quad in Georgia? Definitely pick-up magnetic gravel in the dirt of south Georgia. At 8:03 you verify motor shaft runs true. Do the prop adapters ever get bent without bending motor shaft? They are two separate items, correct?

[@txfieros]

I had a nasty vibration problem even with balanced props. It was on an FPV250 frame which has pretty flexible arms so any vibration seemed to magnify. It ended up being that on even light crashes, the shaft on the 1806 motors was so thin that it would bend. If i turned the motor by hand I could see that gap between the bellhousing and the base increase and decrease. Sometimes I could straighten it out by bending the shaft by bending it by pushing on the bellhousing. I ended up replacing those motors with Lumenier 2204-2300Kv motors. The difference even when the 1806's were new was like night and day. The 1806's were cheap RTFQ motors the were never as balanced as the Lumenier ones. Good luck with the issue.

[@JoshuaBardwell]

+txfieros I put four brand new props on and it seems to be gone, but I only flew one battery to check, and only checked the FPV view, not the HD camera. My current guess is that I had a prop that was imbalanced from the factory, so even though I had new props, I had an imbalance issue. My other guess is... at the end of the flight session, broke an arm on what was not a terribly intense crash. So maybe I just got unlucky, but I wonder whether the arm was weakened in some way and was flexing.

[@txfieros]

+Joshua Bardwell based on my experience with flexible arms on the FPV250 that is now mothballed vibrations become more intense when your arms are flexible. I just do a quick balance on my props to even out the light blade. I don't bother with balancing the prop hub any more.

[@zenman8269]

The level of vibration you were getting on the motor test tab is definitely not pointing to the motors as the cause of the problem. Really anything below 0.1 I would consider good enough to not cause any noticeable problems specially on the HD footage. I recently began to notice some noise in my motors after a couple months of hard use and crashing. Although not much noticeable vibration on video, I could feel it and hear it. Checking the vibration on the motor test tab revealed vibrations well over 0.1 and some close to .5. My guess is bataflight ( runing at 2k )is doing a superb job of countering this and giving great smooth performance even with crappy motors. Will be cleaning spending sometime getting the vibes down to where they should be. In your case I would expect the problem to be a very out of balance or bent prop. Sometimes even HQs can be terribly bad. If they where warped during shipping or by being packed together too tightly, a blade can deform enough to cause uneven thrust which results in vibration. Only dynamic balancing can fix this, or, just throw the prop away, it's going to break anyway :)

[@JoshuaBardwell]

+Zenman FPV I agree that anything below 0.1G is probably not causing visible vibrations. I had ruled out props because I had all new props on the copter when the issue was happening, but replacing the props seems to have fixed it, so my guess is it was a bad prop from the factory.

[@zenman8269]

+Joshua Bardwell I have been using tri blades as of late and did not notice any problems with the HQ nylons but the carbon mix seem to be more prone to deformation that probably accours during storage or shipping, they are easily bent.

[@CarlssonvomDach]

Interesting video,...i always learn something in your videos although u didnt find the problem. I also have this gap on one t-motor, but it doesnt effekt so much, that i could see it in my flightvideos. In my case the whole base with the anchors is tilt, thats where the gap comes at my motor.

[@zenkinsw]

Hi Joshua, Check out the frame if tweaked badly as arms not level or out of shape do create oscillation as I found.

[@hoverbotfpv3547]

Great vid! I use a good video camera to check motors at 240fps then slow it down. You can imeadiatly see which of them has bearing or shifted shaft issues. It would be a good bid if you could explain the mechanical nature of gyros and how they can get stuck. You can free them with a reverse impact of crash to fix. Also even on the grand daddy of 32 boards the freeflight 1.3 we used to hack before timecop used it for naze design the accl can suffer in hard impacts. Why? Again great channel,

[@anmoldeepsingh9281]

Hey, Joshua, I am sorry to comment at an old post, I am newbie and It's been quite a while I bought myself a wizard x220, I noticed yaw oscillations and referred to your video and when I raise the throttle slow I hear grinding noise only at a specific position and at the max throttle and that's when the yaw axes start oscillating badly. It's with two of my motors. I removed their bells and they are clean as heck. Maybe it's the bearings then. Will have to buy new ones or can I fix them. Thank you.

[@maxmustermann2197]

I was so stupid and damaged the copper wire a little bit by putting in too long screws... A wire on a coil looks a bit scratched or squished. Is there something I can do to fix it and not having to replace and rewind all the wires? Like to put something conductive on the damaged wire?

[@JoshuaBardwell]

There really isn't a fix. If it's damaged, it's dead.

[@fpvraver]

Can I do the same test in the motor tab in betaFlight? So I'm guessing no. I just tried it the numbers are way higher in bettaflight.

[@FPVish]

im still serching for a vibration in my motors video, this one seems the closest to my problem. thanks but what about if when resetting ther accelerometer axis button , and it doesnt go down to number zero's the way its showing in your video? mine is still resetting at higher numbers, and are alot more drastically higher numbers for all the motors. what does that mean? all my motors are bad?

[@joshtnewby]

I'm a bit late to this one but great info as always. My dvr is fine so will be looking hard at hd camera/mounting.

[@scavenger1776]

if im getting vibrations at mid throttle , does that mean that my p gain is to high or is it something else and does it matter that i have vbat pid compensation on.

[@JoshuaBardwell]

+Scavenger 177 soft mount the FC. Midnthrittle oscillation is due to frame resonance.

[@xpertcrush]

I know its very old video, but could you tell me the solution? what worked for you?

[@slothFPV]

thanks for this vid, reaaaally helpful

[@TobermoryCat]

would you consider running the vibration test in cleanflight and using bits of tape on the bell housing to see if you can balance it again?

[@JoshuaBardwell]

+Tobermory Cat I did give that a try, but I wasn't able to make any improvement. I find the tape-on-the-bell approach to be really hard to make fine adjustments, and the tape always comes off in the field eventually anyway.

[@oliverk8539]

great maybe we can use this to solve our vibrations coming from our oil engine

[@adronepilotcom7278]

would try motor interchange to check parameters. Can it be a CCW-CW issue?

[@Nick-_-452]

So I have a zmr250 (MRM v3) with the Mini titan 2206-2150kv motors. Im chasing a full throttle vibration/shake. Ive tuned the Pids as best I can. I have no overshoot, no oscillations that I can see and yet I still have these vibrations ONLY at 97%+ throttle. almost all 4 of my motors are quiet until about 60% throttle and are very noisy until around 75% where they dip down to below .05g on all axis. Any ideas?

[@JoshuaBardwell]

+sciullo779 Adjust dither in BLHeli to address throttle-specific resonance between the ESC and the motor. This isn't guaranteed to be your issue, but you never know.

[@danielbanda3610]

men its your bearing, don have to get out lake your motor, i had the same problem and i have to put Loctite on the bearing for made harder on the motor. sorry i don speak english

[@krssnoop]

Hi Joshua, Any idea why my gyro readings in the motors tab aren't resetting when I click reset? It's strange the values just bounce up and down.

[@JoshuaBardwell]

+krssnoop they changed from accelerometer to gyro in that tab. That's the reason it doesn't match my video. But reset should still clear the max values.

[@krssnoop]

Yea strange, it might be the flight controller. Thanks for the quick reply.

[@Siphtor]

I've been having some bad vibrations with one of my quads so I tried this motor test and 2 of my motors were getting some higher readings like .07 and .09 Does that sound like that could be the issue with the vibrations? Also, motor number 1 sounded very high pitch compared to the others when it was at full spin, it just sounded more like a high pitch whine. Could that maybe be the bearings going bad? I would appreciate any help you can give, this quad has just been giving me a lot of vibration issues ever since I made some mods(added GoPro mount, installed a new FPV cam and moved the battery to the bottom). I've checked over everything and everything feels solid, no movement on any parts and the vibration is mostly on throttle so I'm thinking it's not a tuning issue.

[@JoshuaBardwell]

If the motors are not new, and you are getting tons of vibrations, swapping bearings or trying a new set of motors is worth thinking about.

[@Siphtor]

Yeah the motors are about 6 months old and they are not the best motors to begin with. Might be time to just upgrade them. Thanks for the quick reply and thanks for all the help I’ve had from watching your videos, keep up the great work.

[@bwanabizz]

Hey Josh, How are we able to judge the motor accelerometer vibration with newer versions of beta flight that show gyro instead of accelerometer?

[@JoshuaBardwell]

+Matteo Bizzaro you can't, and it's a shame.

[@bwanabizz]

Thanks anyways! keep up the great content! big fan from Malawi (country in central Africa)

[@TheXanUser]

i know this what a while ago. but could you swap bell with another motor on the quad to see if the vibration is bell related or not?

[@JoshuaBardwell]

Yeah, absolutely. That kind of a/b testing is sometimes the only way to solve this type of issue.

[@jasonkinkelaar6830]

HeyJoshua I just got new 35 amp esc, using racing edge 2306 2480 kv, I got 2 flight and adjusted pids, I gain is 5-10 points above p gain. When I arm the drone to takes off in the air. The motors get hot. Now one esc is not working. Why would my drone take off when armed with no throttle input.

[@JoshuaBardwell]

Too much gyro noise and/or excess D gain is a cause for this. If you raised D gains substantially then that is probably the cause. Hot motors also indicate excess D gain or too much gyro noise. Put D gains back to defaults. Make sure motor screws are not touching the windings. kzbin.info/www/bejne/m6CVpJ2Kg7hjpsU Check FC for damage such as broken standoffs or anything that would cause vibration.

[@jasonkinkelaar6830]

I took a further look at my fc and Noticed one of my standoffs have broke in half. I swapped all of them out now I’m not having the same issue. First off, I am using an alien frame and whenever I do a roll I hear a rough hard grind sound from the motors. This only happens when I do hard stick movements on the roll axis and occasionally and pitch. The fc and motors are soft mounted. Using betaflight stock PID on the foxeer f405 fc/pdb. Could this be cause of the stock tuning?

[@jasonkinkelaar6830]

Joshua Bardwell - UPDATE. Issue was caused by minimum throttle was too low. here is a video of the grinding noise I explained in my last comment kzbin.info/www/bejne/b5eQqWxvg998Y7s

[@traxxasru]

Hi Joshua, could you please tell me gow to switch between Gyro and Accel in motor tab/ currently i am observing only gyro graph. thanks man

[@JoshuaBardwell]

+Vladimir Ryabkov you can't as far as I know. The devs changed it. They have to change it back.

[@traxxasru]

What a shame :) .. is it possible to use gyro data for oscillation monitoring? Or its not accurate data?

[@JoshuaBardwell]

+Vladimir Ryabkov yes, but I don't know what value is good or bad.

[@alexdalton7290]

Hey would it be safe to run swift 20amp escs blheli with emax red bottom 2205 2600kv? Their rated for 2-4s

[@JoshuaBardwell]

Probably. Most ESCs are a bit under-rated, and you wont be pulling 80 amps for very long.

[@alexdalton7290]

Joshua Bardwell thanks my motor are getting pretty beat might replace pretty soon

[@superhirofpv260]

I've been messing with a horrible vibe issue with my brand new qav210. Motors 2 and 4 display vibrations about -3.x at a certain rpm. I installed new motors (all 4 to be safe)... Lumenier rx2206. That didn't fix the issue, replaced with new esc, that didn't fix the issue. Calibrated the esc... Still didn't fix the issue. Replaced with new bottom frame. Still didn't fix the issue. Replaced Naze... Still nothing... My issue is definitely vibration, I would run beta flight 2.1.6 stock lux pids and drop D down to 5 and still have osciallation on punch outs. Keep in mind I've had this issue from the start with all brand new parts. Any idea what I can be missing here? I even replace all screws and standoffs. Thanks

[@JoshuaBardwell]

Do you get vibes in the Motors tab as well as in flight? If so, that rules out a tuning issue. Have you adjusted ESC timing?

[@JoshuaBardwell]

Do you get vibes in the Motors tab as well as in flight? If so, that rules out a tuning issue. Have you adjusted ESC timing?

[@superhirofpv260]

+Joshua Bardwell since I don't have black box recording, I can't tell I'm getting vibe in flight. I am assuming I am because it is affected when I adjust the d value. At 5 it's not as bad, when I raise to 12 it's horrible. I then checked it out in the motor tabs, and noticed the issue. Haven't messed with timing of the esc, but with my setup I figured I wouldn't have to mess with that, nor am I that familiar with it. I just built my friends qav210 with the exact same setup and no issues. Looking at the lumenier pilots I'm running the Same set up and thinking I wouldn't have to mess with that. I'm running lumineer 20a autoshot esc, lumineer rx2206 2300kv, hq tri props and a Naze 32 rev 5 on their qav210 frame. Tonight I'm going to try to switch motors 2 and 1 and 3 and 4 to see if the vibe follows. Considering that I swapped all the motors before, I'm guessing it won't follow. In my initial statement I said motors 2-4, when it's actually 2 and 3. Sorry about that.

[@JoshuaBardwell]

+SuperHiro FPV My point is just, if you get the vibes in the Motors tab, then it is definitely something between the ESC and the motor, because the Motors tab just sends a fixed PWM signal to the ESC. The PID loop is not active.

[@superhirofpv260]

+Joshua Bardwell thank you for the reply and see your point. But given this, do you have any suggestion on how to possibly fix the issue? Any suggestions would be deeply appreciated. Thank you

[@Invitingsauce]

I crashed in some soft mud once. It was horrible to clean. Front two motors were full of it.

[@JoshuaBardwell]

+Invitingsauce I have had decent results letting it dry and then spinning the motor to blow it out. Judicious application of compressed air can do the trick as well. In a pinch, you can rinse the motors out with fresh water (not salt!) and they will be fine. The bearings are reasonably sealed and the windings are coated. You should probably re-apply oil after this technique, but it'll get you through the day.

[@Jrod_FPV]

good point.... motors could get dirt stuck in them and cause vibration.

[@Invitingsauce]

+quiljw01 yes I let it dry first and it was much easier. I used a soft bristle nylon brush and tooth picks worked great.

[@fpv_dd2708]

nice video. thank you :)

[@ol-man-duffyj688]

I know this a year old but wonder if you could resurrect a good vibe troubleshooting video for us? It's weird but it seems ever since I added SBUS instead of using the Spektrum plug on my KISS FC that I have vibes just over 1/4 throttle. The motor bells actually "hum" from vibrations and the quad looses altitude. Any suggestions??

[@JoshuaBardwell]

There shouldn't be anything about SBUS that would cause vibrations. Mid throttle oscillations are most often due to frame resonance, and can be addressed by soft mounting the FC with rubber vibration isolation standoffs.

[@ol-man-duffyj688]

Joshua Bardwell ok thanks for the quick response Josh. 👍🏼. I saw you mention that before, the crazy thing with my situation is I have flown this Alien frame with zero vibes and only went to the taranis transmitter which had me install the X4R rec. and re soldered the FC for SBUS that's the only change I made. I suppose I'll throw some bearings at the lumenier motors. I even tried a few different props. 🤔 scratching my chin and deep thought seems to help me feel better. Yet.. only slightly.

[@robjuanamo7563]

tried the motor vibration test on my dys 1806 and all my motors were over 0.10

[@JoshuaBardwell]

+Juanamo FPV Personally, I would replace them. But here's the thing: are you sure that a factory fresh motor would be any better? Maybe they are just badly balanced from the factory.

[@robjuanamo7563]

+Joshua Bardwell but if these vibrations are bad then surely it would effect my flight performance. i doesnt.

[@JoshuaBardwell]

Juanamo FPV awesome. Happy flying!

[@Trex450S]

Its a whole lot easier with a pair pf needle nose pliers.

[@slothFPV]

turns out i have extremely bad vibration, got up to 1.31 :(

[@JoshuaBardwell]

+bo holland Well the good news is, if you have some vibration damping on your FC, you can still get good flight performance. But start planning to replace the motors eventually.

[@JoshuaBardwell]

+bo holland kzbin.info/www/bejne/gZKyiJ6bmK6rY8k

[@slothFPV]

i will defo try vibration dampening, wanna build a 4s quad anyways so might not bother replacing motors

[@slothFPV]

will this work for dampening www.hobbyking.co.uk/hobbyking/store/__14094__10pc_O_Ring_set_P3_for_110BS_A2003_A2010_A2016_A2027_A2029_A2030_A2031_A2032_A2033.html

[@JoshuaBardwell]

I can't be sure but it's worth a try.

[@leephcom]

Bardwell, why do you not recommend to your drooling mass of followers that they should be balancing their PROPS first, before trying to diagnose any other source of vibration. The fact this isn't done as a matter of course is a source of deep embarassment for the whole multirotor community. I bet you guys don't even realise someone balances the wheels on your car when it goes for new tyres, huh? This is simple stuff... seemingly forgotten.

[@JoshuaBardwell]

I will never manually balance any acro or racing quadcopter prop. If they aren't sufficiently balanced from the manufacturer, I won't use them. The reason for this is that they break too often. Even if you argue it takes only a minute or two to balance each prop, I often come back from a day of flying with 20 to 40 broken props. There is no way I am going to spend that long balancing props. The fact is, high quality props in sizes 6" and smaller are sufficiently balanced from the manufacturer. You don't have to spend additional time balancing them. This stuff is not forgotten. What happened was, everybody used to fly 9" and larger props, and yes, for those sizes, hand balancing is essential. Also, those larger quads didn't fly proximity like FPV quads today do, so broken props were less common. We "forgot" prop balancing the same way we "forgot" how to crank-start an automobile: we moved past it.