I’ve used DroneDeploy and MapsMadeEasy apps successfully, and fed the images into Pix4d
Thanks Stuart.
Stuart, How do you like Map Pilot for DJI ? I’ve looked at the maps made easy app, but didn’t like the idea of having to pay for App and the data processing.
I thought the app was very professional, I was able to setup a multi-battery flight and do it out of cell range. The app is free, but you have to pay for mapping over a certain number of images. I didn’t try their backend service, so far I’ve just used the free version of DroneDeploy - which is pretty impressive, though now the free tier is pretty limited in resolution.
Looks to me like all of these processing options work fine off of images gathered with any capture mechanism.
@Stuart: They sell the app and then charge you for using it? Can you get the geotagged images as a final product without going through Maps Made Easy?
Yes, the app just guides the drone to take images in a grid. From there I was able to use the images in Pix4d and dronedeploy
Still not clear, you have to pay extra to take the images or over a certain number of images or area?
@support: you can’t drag another las file in the Ray cloud editor like you can with the windows version.
@tom kidd: I own a Mac Pro (latest 2013) and Pix4D seems to run well, but some crashes occurred: I don’t know why. You can see my system in the first screenshot (October 13, 2015 18:52) in this blog. Where do you live, if I can ask it? Different countries have different rules: in Italy is impossible to fly over cities, for example, or is possible at certain conditions very hard or very expensive to do.
Thanks Antonio.
I am in UK. Cities are a problem here too.
@ Vertical
…feeling a little self conscious for hijacking another conversation
Here’s what I found for capture apps.
Pix4d’s doesn’t work with P3/I1, it never gets past asking for wifi, looks like it’s stuck in P2 land
DroneDeploy’s app works great. Use it if you have access to an Android device. Their iOS app is waiting for the DJI API to stabilize before they release it
MapsMadeEasy app cost $, but if you buy it you can create unlimited flights with iOS. I was able to do a multi-flight map of 700 acres. It would be expensive to process those on the backend of MapsMadeEasy. Instead I uploaded the images to DroneDeploy’s free version. They just took it out of beta, now the free version is limited to 20 cm/pixel resolution but it works.
Pix4d Discovery seems able to process images gathered from any of these apps
Good info @Stuart. I’ve been doing free flight with my Inspire 1 with it on time lapse then processing with DroneDeploy or PhotoScan. Im using Pix4D Capture for my Phantom 2V+. We wrote an iOS app for the P2V+ last year with the DJI SDK and it worked, but recently DJI has introduced a lot of changes in the SDK for the P3 and Inspire 1. The latest update adds secure communications for the apps and drone which is a mandatory update. We went back an updated our app to see how hard it would be update. We were lucky that it was not that difficult. Companies like Pix4D and DroneDeploy probably got set back a lot with all the SDK updates and that’s why we see the iOS apps lagging behind a few months. I’ve debated having our guys build an app to fly a flight plan made with a web based app like DroneDeploy because I’m tired of waiting for an iOS app.
Stuart and David. All good to know. Thanks. I wish your guys would build one David. Let us know if it becomes available.
Purchase Map Pilot and tested today with one of our P3Ps. Did not test the Inspire. It worked very well and is much more reliable than running the Capture App on an Android device. My only two critizims are that it won’t fly lower than 131 ft. and the elevation geotags are AGL and not ellipsoid heights as provided in the p4d file created by the Capture app. Probably no big deal if you are not using GCPs, but a big deal with my clientele.
I just noticed Pix4D released an update to version 2.0.89 today. When you launch your mac version it will check for the update or you can download it here: https://mapper.pix4d.com/download/mapper/dmg/
What happened? (Ver. 2.0.89)
This is the screenshot shown when I open my last project: the map appears fragmented! Help.
Another big problem shown in this screenshot: what happened? (Ver. 2.0.89)
So far the performance of the mac version is great. I did have one crash while switching map types in the Map view while it was processing.
Also, I’ve noticed that the “open recent” menu isn’t tracking my files. I also can’t get the Open Project button to start a file picker from the welcome menu.
How do I close a project to open another one without quitting Pix4D on the Mac?
It looks the the Map View Satellite tile rendering has broken in the 2.0.89 build. The map view displays the flight path correctly, but as you can see in the screenshots the satellite view does not tile the imagery correctly or accurately place the imagery beneath the flight path in the proper geolocation.
@David Barton It is the same I have noticed and shown in the screenshots above. I’m glad that this happened to others and not to my computer only.