Mōvi Carbon Pro Tips

Here are the most common issues and mitigation strategies for Carbon customers. As always Freefly support is here to help if you run into issues!

Software

• You need to be running Mōvi firmware v2.0.10 or above for FRX Pro to work

  • Mōvi Controller (MC) will need to be on v4.1.3 or above with this package

• Get the latest software for fixes and improvements

  • iOS v2.0.2 includes Carbon firmware v2.0.16. Get it here

  • Mōvi Controller firmware v4.1.7 includes the “Reset Attitude” feature (see below). Get it here

• Carbon does not need to be autotuned and the gains / filters do not normally need any adjustment

• If you run a window of < 4 on the MC you will start to see joystick noise in the image

  • Additionally, if you are using FRX Pro on the MC, make sure that it is getting power from an external power supply, as noted in the Using FRX Pro section of the wiki.

• The Carbon IMU takes six minutes to fully initialize. Leave Carbon powered on and sitting still during this initialization phase. Try not to even touch Carbon during this phase, any slight motion can influence the initialization.

  • When the six minute IMU initialization period is complete, the yellow indicator on the bottom left of the Mōvi screen turns grey. At this point the roll/horizon may still be a few degrees off (1 to 4 degrees). You may use the “Reset Attitude” feature (see below) to reset the attitude estimate and level the roll axis. Otherwise Carbon should level out on its own after ~15 minutes.

  • If Carbon is powered down even momentarily it will require initialization again.

• The Carbon IMU has a max rate of 200 deg / sec. If you exceed this it could corrupt the attitude estimate and roll / tilt / pan could drift. If this happens please activate the new “Reset Attitude” feature (see below).

  • If you operate Carbon with full pan / tilt rate you will need to be gentle on the joystick or you can get some interaction / slapping with the inner / outer axis. Right now the acceleration limits are not limited. Alternatively if you absolutely do not want this to happen you can reduce the pan speed or reduce the remote scale to a value of 150 deg / sec or less

• There is a new “Reset Attitude” feature that will temporarily tell Carbon to ignore the gyros and listen to the accelerometer to level itself. It's important to be stationary and not accelerating when using this feature. In the iOS app this button can be found under Monitor > Status > Terminal. In the Mōvi Controller it can be found at the bottom of the Mōvi Expert menu, named "Carbon Attitude: Reset".

• Make sure you power down your camera when you change camera settings so you do not lose them when you turn Carbon off.

Electrical

• Be careful when using DC-DC voltage regulators to power accessories like video transmitters. Our internal testing has found some lower quality regulators can inject noise into the IMU estimate of Carbon and cause drift/horizon issues

Mechanical

• You do not need to balance Carbon, it comes pre balanced from Freefly

• If you add accessories to Carbon you will need to adjust pan balance, this is the only adjustment you will need to make

• Carbon needs to have either a UV filter or a ND filter in place to balance properly

• Please do not adjust the inner axis, the balance is precisely set at the factory and it takes special equipment to achieve the level of balance needed for Carbon to perform at full zoom

• To check pan balance, tip Carbon to the side and see if Pan swings forward / backwards - adjust as needed to prevent this

Support

• If you do have an issue that you cannot solve please provide the following. With these items Support can solve the issue 10x faster than with just a text description

  • Video of the behavior

  • List of your setup (with FWs running on each item)

  • Log file of the behavior