@Jonas: Yes I have choosen P3P (beta)
The first warning says: Set the S1 switch to the uppermost position (allow auto pilot)…
When I come to the window with all the green checkmarks - it says ‘F’
@Lene: And is the drone type “P3P (Beta)”? Are you using any special mode in DJI Go (e.g. IoC)? Sometimes it conflicts with Capture…
@Jonas: I don´t have DJI Go running - Is that incorrect. Was afraid that the two apps would conflict.
I just thought of one additional piece of feedback. It would be more efficient to allow “rounded turns” for waypoints at the end of each row in grid missions, rather than having the drone try to hit each waypoint exactly and stop there before moving on. This would, in turn, free up more time to fly larger grids. I’ve done this using DJI’s ground station with my Phantom 2. It saves a surprising amount of time, and has no real impact on coverage or overlap between scenes. I believe I read in one of the forums that the SDK now allows these rounded turns, so it would be great to implement it in Capture.
Jeff
@Lene: That is completely correct. DJI Go conflicts with Capture, so they should never run at the same time. I will investigate into your bug, right now I am not sure why you cannot takeoff.
@Jeffrey: Good point. We will check those new features when the current firmware / SDK gets more stable, but that is planned ;-).
I did 2 test flights with the a P3P and a Galaxy S3.
I have to say I had been really excited as going through all the various checks went really smooth and the copter started its mission instantly! Well done!
And thank you for implementing the lower altitude down to 10 meters!!
- Flight
All went well but at around 16 minutes I got cold feet, distance was at around 300 meters, I stopped the mission a flew the copter back manually.
- While I did this, the copter still took pictures. Not a big deal and certainly not a problem, but something you might want to look into when you have time.
- It would be nice if the endpoint of a mission would be by default as close as possible to the start position. With that, as the battery gets emptier and emptier, the copter would be as close to the start position as possible and not 300 meters away from you while the mission ends. I know, the mission can be turned around manually, but why not have the end point at the start point by default.
- Uploading the pictures on the field to the cloud totally failed. Ok, bandwidth out in the field was not perfect but the upload did not even start. Or the app at least did not show any progress. After about 5 minutes the status was still on picture 1 out of 320 and then the Galaxy S3 then freezed totally.
A normal restart of the S3 was not possible. I had to press the start/stopp button for about 30 seconds.
- Flight
- All good. After about 12 minutes DJI Go USB message suddenly kicked in, which immediately killed the connection to the copter.
Could this messages from other apps not somehow be captured?
Even that link was broken, P3P continued its mission but at the end of it, it did not land or returned home, but just hovered in the air.
Taking over and land manually was the solution.
- Uploading of files to cloud failed again, phone crashed.
Overall, very good progress! Keep up the good work!
Well I finally tried it out on my inspire 1 with a NIR, Blue filter. I set the flight grid and it took off. I tested at only 100 ft, to try it out… it worked pretty nicely. It returned back to the home point and I had plenty of pics. A couple of things:
- Please fix the battery indicator as soon as possible
- It travels at 20 ft per second… any way to adjust that? Will it travel faster at higher altitudes?
- Abort button failed… be good if that could work. Switching to P worked though
- Can we premake the flights on the app and save the missions before going out? Like have a master mission, with multiple child missions in it. As to cover a farm will take multiple missions.
- I’d love to see the camera output as it is flying
- What / where is the upload at the end going to? Is there some pix4d cloud storage service?
Good morning.
I have a PHANTOM 3 professional 3 with firmware 1.3.20 original.
I have a Samsung Note 4 phone with the CAPTURE 2.0.3 application installed.
I’ve done a little consistent test to select a small grid of 50 x 50 near my position and give order to the phantom to perform the flight through the application Capture. Apparently the waypoints have been transferred to the drone and it has begun to move engines. I have also been able to see the drone telemetry such as battery or satellite. With the 2.0.2 version of Capture, I have not been able of connect with the drone. Before testing of truth with propellers installed need to know if there are any compatibility between the original version 1.3.20 of DJI either need to forcibly install firmware SDK V01.04.0005.
From my point of view it is essential to implement the functionality to be able to divide a very big mission in small missions, then in later missions complete the grid completely. It is also interesting to be able to define an irregular polygon. If for some reason we do not want to enter into a land that we have no authorization to fly, if we can define an irregular polygon, we can perfectly define the area that you want to capture without going into an area that we have no authorization. Would also be interesting to be able to fly in circle or ellipse around an object at various altitudes order to capture detailed a building for example or a tower.
Thanks
- Again, thank you so much for the feedback
- About the drone taking pictures after the end of the mission, I have observed it, too. Will be fixed!
- For the endpoint, I am not sure what you mean. We could make sure that if both the first and the last waypoint are on the same side of the grid (i.e. even number of lines), then they are closer to the drone. Is it what you mean?
- I would guess that the synchronization with the drone failed, and not the upload to the cloud. Can you confirm that? That is not really stable, both because of my implementation of it (sorry, working on that ;-)) and because the SDK is actually not really stable…
- When you say “DJI Go” message, was it a message from the phone appearing because it detected the “USB Accessory”? That would mean that the USB connection to the remote controller was lost for a while. Anyway, we have no way to intercept messages outside of Capture, and I hope the USB connection will be more stable in the future firmwares.
- Right now, Capture calls the drone home when the last waypoint is reached. In the future, we will upload that directly in the beginning, so that the drone comes back even if Capture loses connection.
@Keenan:
- The battery level comes from the SDK, and it was working with the previous firmwares. I guess it will be fixed in a future version.
- We set the speed depending on the altitude. You have control on that in the settings (“speed vs reliability” control). You don’t have a direct access to the speed, but you can ask the drone to fly slower.
- We are thinking about this “premake” option, but the priority now is to make the current app much more stable.
- The camera output is working for me during the flight. What did you see? Was is a black screen?
- If you “sync with drone” it just tries to download the images from the SD card of the drone to your phone (but this is not stable with the new drones). When you upload, it sends everything to your account on mapper.pix4d.com, and it makes a “quick processing” on the cloud so that you can quickly have a preview of the results.
@guillermo
- The public firmware (1.3.20) does not allow us to control the drone. You need the firmware V01.04.0005 for that. This is not our choice.
- Thanks for the suggestion, we would like to have those features, too. But as said before, the priority now is to make the app as stable for the P3 / I1 as it is for the P2V+! =)
@Jonas
Endpoint
What I observed. If you plan a rectangular mission. The end of the mission has the biggest distance to the start point. So we risk that in larger missions the copter flies ‘home’ with an almost empty battery.
To avoid that, I had to turn the mission manually by 180°.
Now the copter flies to the end of the grid first and while working on your mission it gets closer to the pilot and gets more and more visible.
Does this makes sense?
USB Message
I guess it was about the ‘USB Accessory’. The cable had not been unplugged and DJI Go had not been running the background. Still it was able to ‘sabotage’ the mission.
@Jonas
3 more challenges:
Altitude in point cloud
I took about 300 pictures all at 20 meters. So you would expect that the height at the start point measured within the Point Cloud would have a value of 0 meters, correct?
Using the Vertical Coordinate System at default level (MSL egm96) the start point shows an altitude of minus 40 meters. Using Geoid Height Above WGS 84 of 0 meters the start point shows a height of minus 4.9 meters.
Different exposure settings
The pictures from single missions show very strong differences in how they have been recorded. Not really sure what’s the difference but I guess it the exposure setting. This has a negative effect in how the final ortho pictures looks like.
Calibration issues at 10 meters
30% of about 200 pictures of a 10 meter mission have not calibrated by Pix4D Mapper. I assumed, observing the flight of the copter, that the result would be almost perfect and the Pix4D Mapper would might not be able to calibrate 2 to 3 pictures.
But 30% is a lot. Looking at the pictures manually I still believe that the overlap seems to be ok, so I don’t know where the issue is her.
@Jonas
So I found a few things that seem odd. First the app runs at 99% which doesn’t seem to slow things down except the camera wasn’t taking pictures at a perfect interval. Also the project file that was created was useless. I kept getting massive camera calibration issues when I tried to use it. If I created a new project while my camera still needed calibration, I could actually use it. My guess is due to the high CPU load the capturing of the GPS info was not inline with the actual photo taken.
I did make sure that all other apps were turned off. Is there anything else I can do to lower the CPU?
@Jonas
One more thing, I would like to see better battery management. I know the battery is an issue with the SDK. However the Large and Too large grid warnings seem way too conservative. What if you could create a massively large mission that would take multiple missions and it comes back with how many batteries it estimates it needs. It then flies the mission, when the battery gets to some threshold it remembers where it is returns home. You swap out the battery and then some how say continue mission and picks off where it left off… I know you guys are working on stabilizing the platform. (I was a product manager for a large software company in my prior life so I get it) This is just food for thought down the road.
- Got it for the end point. Good point!
- For the USB: the “USB accessory” connection is not completely stable yet, but we have zero control on that =/.
- For you white balance problem, that is a known issue, we will fix it as soon as possible!
- For the calibration issue, I have seen that Paul is taking care of that.
@Keenan:
- Actually, I don’t get why Capture is using that much resources with the new firmware / SDK, and I am investigating into that.
- For the suggestion for bigger flights, that is also something that has been suggested already, and that is a really good idea. Be sure that we have all that in mind for the future, and thanks for the good ideas! =)
I am running FW 01.04.00.06 on I1 and the 2.0.3 Capture app. Since I started with even older FW and beta Capture app, the mission interface tells me that battery is 0% and the pre flight checks fail. There is an icon in the telemetry that shows 99% is that the battery? Still does not solve my pre flight check problem.
@Anton: You have two different battery levels: the battery of the drone (main one), and the battery of the remote controller. The one appearing inside the popup is the battery of the remote controller. As said above, if your Inspire 1 says that its battery is empty, you can ignore the check like so:
- Go to settings, enable “Advanced mode”
- In the safety checklist, click on the hyperlink corresponding to the battery level and check “ignore”
@Jonas: I assume that is a temp fix? How else will I know what the status of the aircraft battery is.
@Anton: Obviously, yes ;-). We expect the SDK to give us a valid number. If it doesn’t, then Capture does not know it. That is something that should be fixed in the SDK / on the firmware of the drone, and not in Capture.
Another question I have for NDVI, will we have the choose to select raw images? (or maybe it does and I have not found it yet) Your articles suggest never to use jpg, oddly though your examples all use jpgs for agriculture. Here is the article I am referring to:
https://support.pix4d.com/hc/en-us/articles/204894705-Camera-Requirements-For-Precision-Agriculture
I have no idea why, but I cannot get the P3S_FW_v01.04.005.bin firmware to install on my Phantom 3 advanced. I tried by first removing original bin from card, and using the new bin file. The green camera light did eventually go solid, but I had nothing to show for any update at all. I then tried again with original bin on the card as well as the new one. And to make things worse, when I went to try and go back to original firmware, I can not. The Pix4D capture app keeps crashing every time I go to run a mission, and I also cannot get the original DJI Go app to connect with Phantom now.
WHAT IS GOING ON???