A couple years ago I bought parts to build drones from China and soldered them up to make the perfect drone for my needs. It was a fun and great learning experience and helped with my understanding with small board electronics. Since then, I purchased several ELRS recievers so I could move over to using my Jumper T-Pro controller.

ExpressLRS is a great opensource CrossFire alternative that I came across as a cheap and effective way to increase the controllable distance of my drones. I bought some small connectors from HappyModel and put them away in my “ToDo” drawer. I recently had the urge to fly my drones again after so long of letting them be a decoration on my office wall. I unsoldered my old connector, soldered it onto my drone and turned it on. Viola! It powered on and would let me connect to it via wifi to setup, a neat aspect of its tech. I decided since it went so well with my little mosquito drone that I would do it to my other ones. I hooked it up to my Five33 Racing Drone I made and tried to connect to it. This time was very different…No lights. I placed my drone down and started to google while I had it connected. I had no fear anything could happen as I did the same with the other drone while updating the firmware of all the parts. After some time a wifi network did show up, I clicked connect, typed the password then…POP! The ELRS Receiver blew and caught fire. I instantly pulled the power and threw the drone to the ground.

Working with FPV drones you do come to an understanding of the dangers of the Hobby, from the Lithium Batteries, to scalping you or someone with a drone. I never expected to smell magic smoke during a simple setup. After some googling, it seems that this was an issue with a particular firmware for some ELRS Recievers. During setup, the receiver would heat up past what was a suitable point and fail if no intervention is made. With this info now and instruction on how to update the firmware, I know I may not run into this issue again. It is crazy to see the possible dangers that could come from a firmware update. I am glad that I only lost a $20 receiver to it.