- Supporting a lower altitude will probably come in the next beta version. It will show a warning because users will have to be very careful with potential obstacles.
- For the RC, we have not experienced that yet. It is probably a good question for DJI’s support. Let us know as soon as you have news about that!
Thank you @Jonas. That would be great! And a warning makes totally sense. Do you also plan to integrate the usage of existing terrain information so that the copter could keep a relative distance at a hillside for example?
About the RC. I was able to fix it with the help of DJI Go. DJI support insisted that it had something to do with sticks not being centred, while turning on the RC. And because calibrating did not work, they asked me to send the RC in which would have meant I would be without it for a couple of weeks.
I believe that the firmware was just totally screwed up as it would not even ready from USB sticks anymore.
The only way out was the usage of DJI Go and I was able to recover the firmware from there. Now after hours of try and error I’m back on track…
To the Pix4D team:
I know you are working hard on this.
Do you have a rough idea of when the next release will be ready?
For example, later this week, or next week?
Thanks.
- Happy to see that your drone is working again! Thanks for the details!
- Using existing terrain information would be great, but it is not easy to do. Our priority now is to support the new drones, and to improve the user experience on what we already have. That might come, but not in the short term.
- We still need some work to support the new firmware / SDK. I cannot guarantee anything right now, but the goal is to have the new version in the end of this week!
So I am struggling to update the firmware on the controller. I got the latest beta firmware on my drone, but the controller I can’t get it installed. The instructions say to use the Go App, but the Go App doesn’t seem to want to install the beta version only the public release. How are you installing it?
@Keenan: Same problem here on all our drones! Therefore, we did not update the controllers. It looks like it is working…
Well good to know I am not the only one. I wonder if that is related to why I can’t upload any missions.
@Keenan: The new firmware is, but not the fact that you could not update the controller. Beta firmware 1.04.x broke compatibility with Capture. Once we release 2.0.3, everybody will have to update to 1.04.x because it will not be able to support older firmware versions anymore. We have no control on this unfortunately.
Hi there. Any idea when the new version of the app will be available?
@Deneys: Already answered a few posts above: the goal is to have it this week 
to update the controller, you can put the bin (update) file in a clean mini SD card and connect it directly to the controllers usb port… Waite 2 minutes after switching on the controller and the update will begin.
Last week I returned from two weeks of field work in Iceland using two P3Ps to map some volcanological features in Iceland. We flew something like 50 missions using the current beta version of Capture on a Nexus 7 II. Overall, the app performed superbly, especially for something still in beta. Far better than trying to manually fly grids and trigger photos, which is what I was doing before. There are some things that still could use some work, of course. I made some notes on the last day I was there that might be useful to the developers:
I mentioned this in another post prior to leaving, but it’s worth re-emphasizing how useful it would be to improve the caching system for base maps. This would include better control over the areas to be cached, the zoom levels that would be cached, and perhaps even which map database to use (including the option for the user to provide their own georeferenced image or base map). We were in a remote area that was hours from the nearest internet connection. We tried caching our area beforehand, but it did not work very well. In the end, most of our missions were just planned in the field on a blank background (no map).
It would be really useful to give the user the option to display the flight paths of previous missions to help in planning subsequent missions. A lot of our targets were larger than the biggest area that could be covered in one flight, so we ended up flying adjacent rectangles over several missions. The app usually saves the grid flown on the previous flight, but no more. It’d be great if one could go into the list of saved missions and click on little checkboxes to show the flight path for those missions on the map. Bonus points if such tracks could be imported from other tablets running other UAVs, to help coordinate multi-aircraft campaigns like ours.
I noticed that when it was windy, the rows in my grid missions could become distorted into curves rather than straight lines between the endpoints of the row. Sometimes the distortion could become significant, with deflections as much as 1.5 times the spacing between rows. Perhaps this could be fixed by adding intermediate waypoints along each row, especially for really wide grids (we were flying 720x220m boxes at 100m height most of the time). The deflection caused poor coverage in the center part of the rectangle on the upwind side. I can provide example flight paths if this problem isn’t already known.
In a couple instances when it was really windy, the P3P would complete the first row of its grid on a mission and then “stall out” trying to fly upwind for the next row. It would sort of sit there at the start of the row and make a few haphazard attempts at heading back toward the other end of the rectangle. In these cases, I had to abort the mission and fly home manually. Interestingly, I really had no trouble fighting the wind getting back, so it wasn’t like the winds were so strong as to exceed the P3P’s capabilities. It seemed more like it just wasn’t willing to use its full capability to fly against the wind when Capture was in control.
The app needs to provide more flight telemetry data - things like current altitude, horizontal and vertical speed, distance from home point, etc. Compared to flying with the DJI app, I felt very data-starved for knowing the state of the aircraft, especially in instances when I had to abort the mission and manually fly home.
It would be great if the user could draw other types of polygons besides rectangles and then the app would figure out the optimal pattern of rows (perhaps of different lengths) to fill it. A useful variant of this would be to allow the user to specify numerical lat/lon or UTM coordinates for the vertices of the target polygon.
In a couple instances, the P3P simply did not fly as expected when the mission was engaged. Normally it would first climb to the specified altitude and then head to one of the corners of the rectangle to start mapping, but in these instances, it did not climb first and just went off in some random direction, even exiting the rectangle. I had to abort these missions and manually fly home. Rebooting the tablet seemed to help for the next try. The issue may have been that the DJI app was also still running in the background on the flights when this problem occured, but I’m not certain. If having another app running simultaneously can cause potential command conflicts, then Capture should do some kind of check when it starts up to make sure no such apps are running, and if they are, refuse to let the user go any further without first closing the other app(s). It was most disconcerting to realize the aircraft was flying in directions and at altitudes that had nothing to do with the planned mission or my stick inputs!
The app doesn’t seem to properly recognize when a mission has ended. I never let the app land the aircraft - I think it’s a much better practice to move the P-A-F switch to P and land manually. However, even after I stop the motors on landing, the app still displays the “Abort” button. This even carries over into the next time I want to launch a new mission with a new battery in the aircraft. The only way I could find to get back to the point where I could set up a new mission in the app was to kill it and re-start it.
I had one instance during when switching from the app’s map view to the live camera view crashed the app mid-mission.
I think someone else may have pointed this out already, but it seems that any previous exposure value settings from the DJI app carry over into the photos taken by the Capture app. I had one mission in which the photos all turned out to be severely overexposed because I had previously been flying with the DJI app and had turned up the EV dial a bit. I might have noticed this via the Capture app’s live camera view, but since switching to that view had caused the app to crash on an earlier mission, I tended to avoid going to that screen.
Dumb question, but I noticed that the little green camera icons indicating the positions on the map where images have been acquired are shown in different orientations. What’s the significance of the orientation of that icon?
Hopefully this feedback helps. As I said, overall I was very pleased with the app. We collected a huge amount of data very efficiently, and mostly without any problems.
Jeff
@Jeff: Thank you so much for that awesome feedback! Here are my answers:
- That is something we really want to improve as soon as possible!
- We are thinking about something like that, but right now we are focused on improving the stability of Capture. It will come as soon as possible!
- Known issue, that is on our TODO list
- The maximum speed is not the same in autonomous and in manual mode. I don’t really know why, but it is the case. So
actually, maybe it was too windy for the autonomous mode… I would say that the limit is 15 m/s in manual and 10 m/s in
autonomous. - We show the telemetry on the upper right corner of the window. If it is not showing, press on the battery icon. Let
me know if it is still not showing… - Do you have many situations where a polygon would significantly improve the mission? It is more complex to set up and
more confusing for the users, so we don’t want to add that if it is not useful. - That is a real problem, and we never experienced that. Let us know if you observe that again. We will try to do
something about it, but honestly I think the SDK/Drone should not do that at all. - Tell me if you still observe that on 2.0.3 (that will be released this week)
- Okay, will take this into consideration
- We might have forgotten some settings, I will check that. Also, some settings come from the DJI app and we cannot control them from the SDK. We are working with DJI on this point.
Sorry for the inconvenience =/. - That is fixed in 2.0.3!
Ok maybe I am asking the wrong question here. How have the folks in this list upgraded from 1.3.2 to 1.4.x? Did you use the app, usb stick or sd card reader?
@Keenan
Simply download V01.04.000x to a formated SD card, put it into the drone, start the drone and wait for about 20 minutes.
@Martin. Ok I don’t have SD card reader, I’ve been trying to use a formatted Usb stick… What SD card reader have you been using?
I’m using a Micro SD card reader from Lexar.
The functionality which allows updating the controller via usb card reader was disabled a few firmware updates ago (whenever the DJI GO app was released). Controller firmware updates can only be accomplished via the app.
That is consistent with what I see. I bought an sd card reader and it did not work. So how do I upgrade my RC with the latest firmware?
I work for an engineering and survey firm and I have to agree with all of Jeffs suggestions, those would be very useful features for me. My experience yesterday running 2.02 Capture app on Samsung Galaxy Tab A running Android 5.0.2, haven’t tried a mission with the P3P, was using P2 V+, as soon as I clicked on grid mission the app forced closed. Tried shutting everything off, rebooted tablet, same result. Downgraded to 1.02, no issues. Except when syncing with device, all the data got written to the device storage and not the sd card. I’m so looking forward to the next beta and flying a mission with the P3P.