GoPro suffers more bad Karma as widespread GPS issue grounds drones

I think GoPro just wants to ever forget they even entered the drone market at this point. Most other people have, but occasionally something pops up that reminds us all how badly they failed at it. Now, more bad news as GPS issues ground the Karma while GoPro investigates.

You might remember the GoPro Karma from such events as “Help, my drone has fallen out of the sky“, “Back? What do you mean you want it back?“, and “So, there’s not going to be a Karma 2?“. Sounds like the latest one is a case of “Wait, where are we?”.

The issue was posted to the GoPro forums, where a number of users also mentioned that they’d experienced the same. Essentially, you turn on the drone, select compass calibration on the controller, which fails and gives an error message about lacking a GPS signal (in an area where there should be no problem picking one up).

I recently got a karma and am having an issue with compass calibration. For some reason this doesn’t work: as soon as I select compass calibration in the controller, within half a second (not enough time to pick up the drone and start calibrating), I get the message ” calibration failed, try again”. It also gives a message about not being able to calibrate the compass without a GPS signal. I am trying this in a field and had the drone there for at least 10 minutes, and the controller has no problem picking up a gps signal: it shows my position on the map exactly. Is there a way to see if the drone has a gps signal? All items have the latest updates installed.

– GoPro forum user “manbehavingbad”

The thread is up to 33 pages as of writing this, with many users complaining about this issue as well as a general lack of support for the Karma drone altogether. GoPro has stated in a blog post that they are aware of the GPS issue, are investigating, and that a firmware update will be coming at some point within the week.

At this point, I think GoPro would be better off just telling people “Look, one-time offer… We’re sorry, we’re buying back your Karma. Accept the deal now or just go away, because we’re done with this thing”.

[via DroneDJ]