@Jonas
I completely agree with Arthur. Correct me if I am wrong but if the front to back and side to side overlaps are controlled independently then the front to back overlap would control the speed at which pictures are taken and the side to side overlap would control the size of the grid. In my case for Agricultural scenarios. I could use the recommended 70% side to side with 85% front to back over lap which would make the drone take pictures more rapidly yet allow for a much larger grid. That would be absolutely amazing as I could almost over twice the area in the same amount of time.
Also I like the idea of defining the overlaps by adjusting a box on the screen that shows the overlap and the numbers. That’s a great idea
using p P3pro, I did a mission and left the pictures in standard 4x3, changing this setting, or photos can only be in this pattern? only now I started testing the app in android because just got IOS. the height scale could be changed to intervals of 5 meters, for 10 to 10 meters seems to be far away sometimes when we want something a little more or a little less.
Thanks everybody for your contributions!
- For the USB connection, Keenan has a safe way to do it. The thing is that it is not stable at all. I don’t know how difficult it is for DJI, but we have no control on that. The point is that they have full control over the USB connection, so they should find a solution at some point.
@Keenan:
- For the drone selection, the drone type should still appear in the upper right corner. Do you think it is sufficient for new users (that are not biased by the old interface), or should we change it?
- BTW, it should not be a big problem if you don’t select the right drone. In the worst case, Capture will not connect or not download the images successfully. The SDK will allow us to detect the drone on our side in the future, so we will use that, too.
- Missing pictures is a known issue: right now, there is no reliable way to ask for a picture or to know if it was taken or not, probably due to the design of the communication protocol by DJI. We can ask the drone to take a picture at each waypoint, but since we are limited to 99 waypoints (don’t ask me why ;-)), then it becomes a bit weird for missions of more than 99 images. Anyway, we are working on a solution for that, hoping that it will be more reliable.
- For the message asking to start Capture when you plug the USB cable, I felt it was a bit aggressive. But we can add it.
@Arthur:
- Good point for the overlap. We will think about that! It is always difficult to have a good trade-off between control and complexity. We want the UI to be easy to use, so we take a lot of care before adding that kind of feature.
@Cort:
- Low: 70; Medium: 80; High: 90;
- When not in advanced mode, you still have those 3 choices.
@Rosival: For now we use the highest resolution by default. Why would you want to change it?
By the way, the download still fails, so keep it disabled for now. It is a bug in the SDK, but it should be better in the next version (so possibly 2.0.6), but I don’t expect it to be completely stable.
@Jonas
Well in an ideal world, I would let the SDK tell me what the drone type was. However in the UI, I would put it both in the Settings screen and Mission screen. Maybe when the drone connects to the app and it sees a different drone type, it asks if you want to change it? On this topic, I thought I read somewhere that they planned to merge the Inspire and P3 SDKs. Looking at the documentation, it feels they just override a handful of classes.
As for the missing picture, I didn’t get the sense it was the drone not taking it. I had a picture for each time I heard a camera click. The camera clicks in the app seemed to happen less frequently at times. Now I am assuming the camera click sound comes from the app and not the SDK.
Personally, I think having the option to start the Capture App alongside the DJI Go App when you plug in the USB cable will help prevent accidental execution of the DJI Go App. I encourage others to chime in there thoughts. I did notice though that if the Capture App sensed the DJI Go App running, it asked you to stop it and jumped to the app in the Application Manager. That is a cool feature.
As for the overlap selection at the very least, I would be great to have separate control over the front to back and side to side overlaps in advanced mode. Making the drones as efficient at capturing photos I hope is one of the goals. I know for myself, it could potentially cut down flight times in half.
Oh I noticed that if I was in advanced mode and I unchecked it then went back to the Mission screen that the overlap was still the percentages and did not show low, medium and high. I am not sure if that is intentional or not.
Ok lastly, I am going to vote like others have to have camera controls in the app.
For the missing pictures, the problem is that the App is telling the drone when to take a picture based on the GPS. If the connectivity is bad, either we don’t receive all the GPS updates from the drone, or the drone does not receive the command to take a picture. Having everything defined in the mission before takeoff would definitely be a plus, but we have to deal with the limitation on the number of waypoints we can send.
I took note of the other requests, thanks!
Aloha Jonas and other testers.
i took a break from testing due to other commitments, but am back at it again.
i am running the new capture 2.5 beta on a Samsung Galaxy tab 4. The Inspire has firmware 1.4.0.01
i had a couple successful flights using capture ap 2.3, but since I updated to 2.5, the capture app keeps closing and saying “unfortunately capture ap has stopped”
should I update to the newer beta firmware on the inspire v1.05.00.11 on the dji developer site or stick with current 1.4 that is publicly available? I’m stoked to see the battery level being reported in the app, but can’t seem to keep the app running, I have checked that dji Go isn’t running. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.
mahalo,
aarom
Hello Aaron,
Do you have a Galaxy Tab 4 (SM-T330NU) running Android 5.1.1? The SDK crashes with it for some reason. I don’t know if there is a way to make it work until it gets fixed by DJI. I reported it already!
USB connection issue, do you guys still have USB debugging enabled? Current firmware does not require USB debugging. DJI GO and Litchi are much more stable with USB debugging disabled.
@Jarmo
Thanks for the info. I did not know this. I will give this a try.
Hi tested the app with a height of 10 meters on a field.
Settings: fast
Angle: 90°
Overlap: 80%
After the flight I loaded all pictures into Pix4DMapper. Unfortunately, the project ‘failed’ as about 80% of the pictures could not be calibrated. Looking at the pictures manually, the overlap seems to be ok, but still somehow it failed.
Any ideas on what needs to be changed?
Thanks,
Martin
Try the flight at 50 to 60 meters. If the field has homogeneous characteristics, it is harder for the mapper app to determine how to stitch images together at low altitudes.
@ Jonas
As a future enhancement, it may be good to have a template of sorts the predefined parameters based on the mission type.
@ Jonas
In flew once again and this time I tried my Galaxy 6 Edge+, it didn’t work. The app wouldn’t connect to the controller. Specifically the Capture App USB window never came up when I would enter the mission screen… However, when I plugged in the USB cable into the controller, the DJI Go App and Litch (A 3rd party drone app for the DJI drones) did pop up. So I don’t think the problem is in the DJI SDK, possibly just something you guys need to configure.
I also still get the skipped picture issue, but I think I am not explaining myself correctly. When ever a picture is taken, I see a little camera icon appear along mission lines. Sometimes, it seems delayed or it skips that picture and I can clearly see the lack of a picture where there should be one on the screen. I think the issue is the app in this particular case.
@Keenan:
- Could you connect at least once? Did you select the right drone in the settings? What we do that DJI Go doesn’t seem to do is that we disconnect from the drone. So when you go back to the main menu (if you are not in a mission), then you are disconnected. But otherwise it should be quite similar… Could you try to force quit capture, unplug the RC and connect again? If the popup never shows up when you go into “Grid mission”, could you send me (or our support, mentioning I asked for it) your Pix4Dmapper.log file?
- I am not sure, but I think I get what you say. I am experiencing the same actually. Let me explain in more details:
-
Capture receives the GPS location of the drone (message drone -> phone)
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Capture decides to take a picture according to the new location, and asks the drone to do it (phone -> drone)
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The drone may or may not take a picture, even though usually it does
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The drone sends a message to say that the picture was taken without any more information (drone -> phone)
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Capture shows the camera icon at the position of the drone when message (4) was received
We have many problems here:
- We might have a delay, and consequently: either we are too late to ask for the picture (if message (1) is slow), or we show an icon that is further away than the actual location of the image (if message (4) is slow). That explains some “gaps”: they are “delays”, actually.
- The connection might lose a confirmation message (4), because they use an unreliable channel for that. In this case, Capture never knows if the images was taken or not, and it does not show an icon. That would be a gap.
That is why we need to make it such that the drone doesn’t need Capture in order to know where to take the pictures. We are currently experimenting on that.
The way you described the picture taking is consistent with what I saw. I also noticed that when the Capture App showed a gap, there in fact wasn’t and in a few times multiple pictures were taken.
I will send the log file that I have. Note, I think everything worked fine until I got the firmware from DJI for the controller. Also I tried a Galaxy Tab S 8.4 and it worked fine with the app and the new firmware. The only difference I can see is OS difference between the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy Tab S
Ok, good to know… the new RC firmware worked on my phones. I’ll have a look at that!
@Jonas and Keenan,
I tried to connect with the new beta using a Samsung Galaxy S6 and It was unsuccessful. I have tried all the different iterations I could think off. Force stop, restart phone, unplug and plug the USB, and cycle the power on the P3 and controller. Basically I had the same exact issues as Keenan. I have not updated the firmware on the DJI controller so I don’t believe that is the issue. I also tried my Samsung Tab S 8.4 and was able to connect just fine.
I have still the same problem, no fpv video on camera mode. The gimbal adjustment works, but no video image.
-P3A
-Nvidia Shield
-Capture app 2.0.5
@Jonas,
I submitted my log file to you via the support feature of this site. If you need another way of contacting me, just let me know. I am going to clear the log file on both my Tab S and 6S Edge and try a simple mission on each, just so you can compare.
A thought maybe especially while this app is in Beta, why not a log file upload button in the app?
@Cort
I suggest you submit your log file from the app. It will be on your phone under Pictures. it is called pix4mapper.log. Just upload and ask the support folks to forward it to him.