Starling 2 intermittently rebooting / VOXL losing power and ESC LEDs stopping

[Marcos Correa]

Hi ModalAI team,

I’m troubleshooting an intermittent issue with a Starling 2 using a VOXL 2 and VOXL Mini 4-in-1 ESC.

The main symptom is that the system will randomly cut out and I get disconnected from both SSH and ADB. At the same time, the blue LEDs on the ESC stop flashing.

I also noticed that when the blue ESC LEDs stop, a green LED on another board in the VOXL stack turns on and stays on. When that green LED turns off again, the blue ESC LEDs return.

A few other observations:

The issue is intermittent. Sometimes the drone can stay powered normally for a while.
We have successfully put the drone into hover, and it was able to stay on for a period of time without shutting down.
The problem has occurred with multiple batteries, so it does not seem isolated to one battery.
In the past, physically pressing or moving some of the cables/connectors sometimes caused the system to start working again.
At one point the ESC would not power on for a while, but after disconnecting and reconnecting the battery, the ESC came back on.
Because of this, I’m wondering if there may be an intermittent power connection, connector, cable, power-management, or ESC-related issue.

I also confirmed that this is not just an ADB communication drop. After one of the disconnects I ran:

adb devices

and no device was listed.

Shortly afterward I ran:

adb shell uptime

and received:

17:18:36 up 0 min, 0 users, load average: 2.62, 0.57, 0.19

and then:

17:18:40 up 0 min, 0 users, load average: 2.81, 0.65, 0.21

So it appears the VOXL is actually rebooting, rather than only losing the ADB connection.

At this point, the pattern seems to be something like:

ESC blue LEDs stop
→ VOXL/ADB/SSH disconnect
→ VOXL reboots
→ ADB/SSH return
→ ESC blue LEDs return

Could you advise what you would recommend checking next?

In particular, I’d like to know:

Whether this behavior suggests an issue with the VOXL Mini ESC / power-management circuitry
Which connectors or power rails I should check first
What voltage I should expect at the VOXL power input for this Starling 2 configuration
Whether there are any logs or diagnostic commands that could help identify the source of the reboot
Whether the green LED behavior I described corresponds to a known power or fault state

I can also provide close-up photos of the hardware, wiring, and LEDs if helpful.

Thanks.

[Marcos Correa]

Pressing down on the The M0141 also causes this reboot any thoughts I can show video if needed. @administrators

[Vinny]

Hi @marcos-correa Apologies for the delays here, I was out on leave for a couple weeks.
It sounds like the M0141 issue you might be having is very similar to this one:
https://forum.modalai.com/topic/1356/sentinel-drone-randomly-reboots/2?_=1790714717250
It's important to use 5mm spacers between any VOXL 2 plug-in board, especially if it only picks up J3 and not J5, since that leave all the pins on J5 vulnerable to contacting circuitry from whatever plug-in board is installed. Symptoms from that contact are most certainly proven to be resets and brown outs, as we have seen that before.
If you are already using spacers between your board, then I'd need to think about other potential root causes.
Hope this helps.
Thanks!
Vinny