@Jonas, thanks for the detailed responses. Replies to your questions:
-
I didn’t know you could toggle telemetry on by tapping the battery - I will try that. I left my Nexus with the field team (they are there for another two weeks) so they could continue making flights, but I will check this out as soon as they return it to me.
-
I guess being able to specify a n-vertex polygon is not super-important if you’re worried about complexity. But I do think it would be be very useful to be able to enter quantitative values for the coordinates of the vertices of a rectangle, at least. In many of the places we were flying, the satellite image base map would have been of limited value even if the caching had worked well because it was of such poor resolution and there was significant cloud cover in it. I would have been really nice to be able to send someone around with a GPS to collect coordinates from the corners of our area of interest and enter those numerically into the planner. That could technically be done using with the current app using UTM coordinates, since they are in meters and the app can show the size of the rectangle in meters, but it would be a pain to do the calculations in the field.
In fact, another improvement that would really help would be to allow the user to plan more than one mission at a time for large targets. In other words, the user would specify a large rectangle, and the app would figure out if it needed more than one flight and divide it up appropriately into two or more missions. The ~200x750-m max size rectangle for the P3P just wasn’t enough (especially considering the high apect ratio of the rectangle) to cover a lot of targets we wanted to map. We were able to manually plan grids for multiple missions by using the flight track from a previous mission to position the grid for the next mission, but that was pretty “iffy” because of the problem I mentioned with those previous flight tracks disappearing. It would really be a lot better if the app just took areas that were too big to cover in one mission and split them up into multiple missions automatically.
- Yes, this was definitely the scariest problem I noted. Like I said, I suspect it may have been caused by conflicts from another app (the DJI Pilot app) still running in the background, though I can’t be sure. Maybe it’d be worth testing this on your end - intentionally leave the DJI app running when you activate a mission in Capture and see if anything weird happens. Also, I haven’t done any re-formatting of the SD card since I flew, so if Capture saves telemetry files, I could send those to you for the missions where this happened.
Actually, that raises another really important point: If the Capture app does not save telemetry data from the P3P (like the DJI Pilot app does), it really should. Such data could be extremely valuable if there was a flyaway incident, both for diagnosing what happened, and for proving to DJI there was a problem (e.g., for making a warranty claim). In my opinion, any app used to control a P3P should be saving those data as a way of keeping everybody honest in the event of a problem.
- Will do (again, once I get my Nexus back).
Thanks for the quick attention to these small problems with an otherwise great app!
Jeff
Hello everybody! I had said that we wanted to release Capture 2.0.3 Beta today. Unfortunately, a last-minute issue prevented us from doing so. We will release it as soon as possible anyway!
@Jeff: Thanks for the feedback, I will take all of that in consideration! Also, we will save the telemetry in 2.0.4!
Hi,
Thanks to Jeff for writing such a detailed feedback -
Working in forestry we have the same issues
Can confirm 1,2,3,5 and 6.
A possibility to set a start waypoint in- or outside of the polygon. We are in the middle of a forest and find a place to start the mission.
Height is another issue. When we out in open fields we need to be able to flight closer to ground. Eg. 3 m above surface.
Can´t wait to the release of 2.0.3
Regards
Lene Fischer
Hello,
I know you’re working very hardly on this new beta release. Can we expect to have the 2.0.3 this early week ?
Hello everybody. We are having quite a hard time integrating the new firmwares. We just released 2.0.3 (see it as a “nightly build” for those of you who already updated your drone. If you are currently using 2.0.2 in production, then you should probably wait until everything gets a bit more stable.
@Lene: Thanks for the feedback! You don’t have to takeoff in the grid, actually. The drone will takeoff, go to the mission altitude and then go to the first waypoint of the grid. Isn’t it sufficient in your case?
Thank you for that !
That mean that we will have an automatic update from the Google Store tonight ?
Will there be a change log some where showing fixed/known issues?
Can you confirm that this release 2.0.3 is compatible with the V01.04.00.06 of the Inspire1 beta firmware ?
We are still unable to connect to the ground station with the newly updated app (2.0.3). Is there a trick to it?
Galaxy SIII:
App seems to work and I will try to do a test flight today.
Nexus 9:
App and tablet crashes at:
‘Allow the app Capture to access the USB accessory?’
Screen freezes, tablet reboots after about 1-2 minutes.
@Mike: This is mainly about supporting the new firmwares, because they broke compatibility with the SDK. We have some improvements such as the feedback of the Smart Grid and some bugs, but we released 2.0.3 as a “nightly build” mainly because of the compatibility issue.
@Zoubir: It is working with my Inspire 1 (V01.04.00.06), even though the battery of the drone is always advertised at 0%. I therefore use the advanced mode (see in the Settings), and when the safety checklist says that the battery is low, I click on the hyperlink and “ignore” the battery check.
@Amber: Are all the other checks green in the safety checklist? Did you try restarting the drone and Capture? Which drone is it?
@Martin: Thanks for the feedback, I will look into that!
Hello!
I’m Einat, and I worked with the same team in Iceland after Joeff left. I’m still nice land do a short message for now.
The two most important things I was missing were:
- Base maps in offline
- display of past flight paths within displayed map area.
The grid mission does not work for my (not Joeff’s) drone at all, a known issue since I’m running dji’s newest firmware.
Einat Lev - LDEO
Yes, all the other checks are green. We tried restarting the whole system several times, but could never connect to the ground station. We have an Inspire 1 running Inspire 1 Firmware v1.3.0.00. Is there a sequence we should use for startup? We usually start the remote control, then Pix4D, then the Inspire. Any advice would be appreciated.
@Einat: Thanks for the feedback!
@Amber: The public firmware does not give us access to the ground station. You need the beta firmware for that (look at point 2 in Paul’s tutorial (at the top of this page). With Capture 2.0.3, you need the latest *beta* firmware.
Hi
My first try with this app.
Just been out with the new release.2.0.3 on a Samsung Galaxy S5 and P3P
The app seem to work. Connect with the RC and Drone.
The drone start and lift off - stop and stay 1 m up in the air.
Have to set in P-mode to stop the flight. Abort don´t react.
Regards
Lene Fischer
@Lene: The new firmware added some “security” features for takeoff, maybe it is not completely stable. Can you try to takeoff manually (say, go to an altitude of 10m) and then start the mission?
PS: In the app it says - Turn on the S1 - but on a P3P there is no such switch. It´s called ‘F’ positioned on the top/back/left side on the RC.
@Jonas: Same same - I have to set from F-mode to P-mode and land manually.
@Lene: Maybe not all the warning texts have been updated. But the safety list should be asking for the “F-mode” and not for S1. Are you sure that you selected the right drone (there is a dropdown list in the Map view)?