Ever had one of those days?

[clolsonus]

I'm sharing my tale of woe in the hopes that someone out there can tell me what I did wrong, or tell me what I could change to do things right. I know I make mistakes or have misunderstandings about how things work, but then I also know our technology and tools are far from perfect. We don't usually like to share our screw ups and misery, but maybe we like reading about other peoples?

We traveled 3 hours to a remote site to survey 2 areas of city-owned land (forested areas with steep terrain, a few hiking/skiing trails cutting through them.) Our project is looking for a specific invasive vine that has spread widely through that area and ultimately chokes out and kills the trees it climbs. (google Oriental Bittersweet.)

We brought two drones: a mavic 2 pro (using my android phone with the controller) and a phantom 4 pro v2 using an ipad mini with the flight controller. We have 3 batteries for each drone. We are using the drone deploy app for mission planning and flight control.

We flew the first area with the Mavic drone. (using the android version of the drone deploy app.) A few minutes into the first battery, the android app reported it had lost connection with the drone. I've seen this before, but usually it reestablishes right away and everything is ok. Meanwhile, the mavic hand controller (LED display) is happy as can be, reporting distance from launch point, battery %, rotor rpm, live updating, etc.

In this case, the android drone deploy app never got it's connection back, although the drone had it's flight plan and continued flying to the end of the battery just fine. At 18% battery the mavic hadn't decided to come home, so I called it home from the hand controller.

When I switched batteries and was ready to start the 2nd flight and resume the route, the drone deploy app recovered it's connection on it's own, but then I discovered the drone deploy app had no knowledge of any of the portion of the first flight after it lost the connection. So it could only resume the flight at whatever point we were at 5-6 minutes into the first flight. What can you do ... so I said ok, and ended up with the 2nd battery/flight mostly overlapping the area we covered with the first flight.

The app connection was ok throughout the 2nd flight and the mavic returned on it's own at the end of the battery (about 20%). I swapped batteries and kicked off the 3rd and final mavic flight and everything worked fine on the 3rd flight too.

The first area wasn't a complete disaster, but we ended up not being able to cover nearly the amount of ground we were hoping to because of the drone deploy app screw up. Has anyone seen anything like this before? Is there any quick tips or suggestions I could have done to work around the problem and maximize my time, my batteries, and the area I want to cover?

This was just the start of my woes though ...

After finishing with the mavic, we relocated to the second area and unpacked our phantom 4 pro v2 with ipad ground station ... also planning and flying with the drone deploy app. The android and iphone versions of the drone deploy app are similar, but not identical.

Here we launched the first flight normally and everything looked good. Our preplanned route/area came up and we happily sent off the drone to begin at the one end of the area. But midway through the flight, new weirdness which I have never seen set in.

The live video (looking down) was working fine, but all the other aspects of the drone deploy app became super laggy. It would only update the route location, battery %, number of pictures taken every minute or two. When I touched the screen to expand the video (or expand the route map) it would take forever to respond ... even though the live video was happily scrolling along. Even though the app was severely misbehaving, the phantom came back at about 20% battery and landed just fine. I don't think we every got more than 800 or 1000' away from our launch point in this flight and I've never seen anything remotely like this before with our phantom or DD on the ipad.

We swapped batteries, and prepared to resume the mission with our 2nd battery, but now the DD app was severely lagging and taking dozens of seconds to respond to screen taps. We somehow managed to get through the checklist and the launch drone icon turned green. We tapped the launch icon and the DD app switched to the in-flight screen mode, but nothing happened. The phantom just sat there and the props never spun up . The DD seemed to think all was well, like it was expecting the drone to do something now. The app offers a pause and restart button on the screen, but pausing and restarting didn't help.

Over the next 30 minutes we tried everything including power cycling the phantom, power cycling the hand controller, power cycling the ipad, reloading the route. At some point, some combination of our efforts worked, and the phantom spun up, took off and correctly resumed the mission.

However, it was apparent right away the DD ipad app was still severely lagging. The video display still worked great and portions of the flight were directly over head so it wasn't like we had roamed too far away when this was going on. At some point the data from the phantom stopped updating (video still ok) and I remember the ipad saying 64% battery. It never changed from there. Thankfully, when the battery got down to about 20%, the phantom dutifully flew back home and landed just like it was supposed to. The SD card had the right amount of pictures so that part worked ok. At least we got some data.

However, from there things just got worse. We spent the next hour trying to get flight 3 started. We power cycled everything multiple times. The DD app on the ipad was just super unresponsive. We could get through the checklist and click the green launch arrow, and the phantom would never spin up. We iterated on all the combinations of restarting things we could, including remaking a route from scratch that was about the area we hadn't net finished and nothing worked.

We worked on trying to get flight #3 launched for about an hour and finally gave up.

So the tally for the day was ... mavic wasted most of one whole battery reflying most of the area of the previous flight because the DD app somehow lost track of the mavic's progress on flight 1 and never regained it ... even when the mavic was directly overhead. And the phantom wasted a whole battery because we literally could not get it launched with the DD ipad app and the app was severely lagging and misbehaving in ways I've never seen before. Because of this we almost didn't get flight 2 off (and wasted a portion of the 2nd battery just sitting on the ground powered on for 20-30 minutes.)

I'm especially frustrated because I don't understand why these things went wrong or what I can do next time out to fix them. I do know that my android DD app updated since the time I had been out flying previously. I also know that new firmware came in for the phantom 4 since my last time out and I said yes to updating that at home about a week ago. But arghhh! This can't be the state of the art, is it? Am I missing something? Did I make an obvious blunder that everyone else knows about except for me? I want to like DD and I want to like DJI but I was beyond frustrated yesterday and possibly into the territory of saying certain words. Help me out here!

Thanks!

Curt.

 

[shooter]

I'm sharing my tale of woe in the hopes that someone out there can tell me what I did wrong, or tell me what I could change to do things right. I know I make mistakes or have misunderstandings about how things work, but then I also know our technology and tools are far from perfect. We don't usually like to share our screw ups and misery, but maybe we like reading about other peoples?

We traveled 3 hours to a remote site to survey 2 areas of city-owned land (forested areas with steep terrain, a few hiking/skiing trails cutting through them.) Our project is looking for a specific invasive vine that has spread widely through that area and ultimately chokes out and kills the trees it climbs. (google Oriental Bittersweet.)

We brought two drones: a mavic 2 pro (using my android phone with the controller) and a phantom 4 pro v2 using an ipad mini with the flight controller. We have 3 batteries for each drone. We are using the drone deploy app for mission planning and flight control.

We flew the first area with the Mavic drone. (using the android version of the drone deploy app.) A few minutes into the first battery, the android app reported it had lost connection with the drone. I've seen this before, but usually it reestablishes right away and everything is ok. Meanwhile, the mavic hand controller (LED display) is happy as can be, reporting distance from launch point, battery %, rotor rpm, live updating, etc.

In this case, the android drone deploy app never got it's connection back, although the drone had it's flight plan and continued flying to the end of the battery just fine. At 18% battery the mavic hadn't decided to come home, so I called it home from the hand controller.

When I switched batteries and was ready to start the 2nd flight and resume the route, the drone deploy app recovered it's connection on it's own, but then I discovered the drone deploy app had no knowledge of any of the portion of the first flight after it lost the connection. So it could only resume the flight at whatever point we were at 5-6 minutes into the first flight. What can you do ... so I said ok, and ended up with the 2nd battery/flight mostly overlapping the area we covered with the first flight.

The app connection was ok throughout the 2nd flight and the mavic returned on it's own at the end of the battery (about 20%). I swapped batteries and kicked off the 3rd and final mavic flight and everything worked fine on the 3rd flight too.

The first area wasn't a complete disaster, but we ended up not being able to cover nearly the amount of ground we were hoping to because of the drone deploy app screw up. Has anyone seen anything like this before? Is there any quick tips or suggestions I could have done to work around the problem and maximize my time, my batteries, and the area I want to cover?

This was just the start of my woes though ...

After finishing with the mavic, we relocated to the second area and unpacked our phantom 4 pro v2 with ipad ground station ... also planning and flying with the drone deploy app. The android and iphone versions of the drone deploy app are similar, but not identical.

Here we launched the first flight normally and everything looked good. Our preplanned route/area came up and we happily sent off the drone to begin at the one end of the area. But midway through the flight, new weirdness which I have never seen set in.

The live video (looking down) was working fine, but all the other aspects of the drone deploy app became super laggy. It would only update the route location, battery %, number of pictures taken every minute or two. When I touched the screen to expand the video (or expand the route map) it would take forever to respond ... even though the live video was happily scrolling along. Even though the app was severely misbehaving, the phantom came back at about 20% battery and landed just fine. I don't think we every got more than 800 or 1000' away from our launch point in this flight and I've never seen anything remotely like this before with our phantom or DD on the ipad.

We swapped batteries, and prepared to resume the mission with our 2nd battery, but now the DD app was severely lagging and taking dozens of seconds to respond to screen taps. We somehow managed to get through the checklist and the launch drone icon turned green. We tapped the launch icon and the DD app switched to the in-flight screen mode, but nothing happened. The phantom just sat there and the props never spun up . The DD seemed to think all was well, like it was expecting the drone to do something now. The app offers a pause and restart button on the screen, but pausing and restarting didn't help.

Over the next 30 minutes we tried everything including power cycling the phantom, power cycling the hand controller, power cycling the ipad, reloading the route. At some point, some combination of our efforts worked, and the phantom spun up, took off and correctly resumed the mission.

However, it was apparent right away the DD ipad app was still severely lagging. The video display still worked great and portions of the flight were directly over head so it wasn't like we had roamed too far away when this was going on. At some point the data from the phantom stopped updating (video still ok) and I remember the ipad saying 64% battery. It never changed from there. Thankfully, when the battery got down to about 20%, the phantom dutifully flew back home and landed just like it was supposed to. The SD card had the right amount of pictures so that part worked ok. At least we got some data.

However, from there things just got worse. We spent the next hour trying to get flight 3 started. We power cycled everything multiple times. The DD app on the ipad was just super unresponsive. We could get through the checklist and click the green launch arrow, and the phantom would never spin up. We iterated on all the combinations of restarting things we could, including remaking a route from scratch that was about the area we hadn't net finished and nothing worked.

We worked on trying to get flight #3 launched for about an hour and finally gave up.

So the tally for the day was ... mavic wasted most of one whole battery reflying most of the area of the previous flight because the DD app somehow lost track of the mavic's progress on flight 1 and never regained it ... even when the mavic was directly overhead. And the phantom wasted a whole battery because we literally could not get it launched with the DD ipad app and the app was severely lagging and misbehaving in ways I've never seen before. Because of this we almost didn't get flight 2 off (and wasted a portion of the 2nd battery just sitting on the ground powered on for 20-30 minutes.)

I'm especially frustrated because I don't understand why these things went wrong or what I can do next time out to fix them. I do know that my android DD app updated since the time I had been out flying previously. I also know that new firmware came in for the phantom 4 since my last time out and I said yes to updating that at home about a week ago. But arghhh! This can't be the state of the art, is it? Am I missing something? Did I make an obvious blunder that everyone else knows about except for me? I want to like DD and I want to like DJI but I was beyond frustrated yesterday and possibly into the territory of saying certain words. Help me out here!

Thanks!

Curt.

Were you flying in clear sky above all possible obstacles or signal interference? Were you in a canyon? Were you flying under trees?

 

[MapMaker53]

Seems to me maybe you should contact the people at DD, as they may have seen this connecting/lagging problem before. Considering you experienced similar problems with both Android and Apple platforms, there may have been a common glitch to both app versions in the latest update.

 

[JDS]

clolsonus,

Sounds like a ROUGH mission!

I also fly the Phantom series and I have had similar issues with lag in the DD app. I found that my issue stemmed from an unusually bad hotspot signal from my cell phone. I had also gone through the restart everything and then it started working. I finally troubleshot down to the Hotspot. My father also had the same issue with his Mavic Pro 2. What I have been doing prior to my missions flights is to cache the map area in DD before leaving a good internet connection. It's helped!

If you weren't using a hot spot, it could be a lag in the cell data connection.

 

[clolsonus]

clolsonus,

Sounds like a ROUGH mission!

I also fly the Phantom series and I have had similar issues with lag in the DD app. I found that my issue stemmed from an unusually bad hotspot signal from my cell phone. I had also gone through the restart everything and then it started working. I finally troubleshot down to the Hotspot. My father also had the same issue with his Mavic Pro 2. What I have been doing prior to my missions flights is to cache the map area in DD before leaving a good internet connection. It's helped!

If you weren't using a hot spot, it could be a lag in the cell data connection.

Thanks JDS, I figured others would enjoy hearing about my misery.

I was using a hotspot (tethering from my android cell phone.) I did observe that the connection speeds weren't great, but I was able to do regular phone stuff with it so didn't think much about that. That would be a bummer if the DD app so so heavily dependent on a fast internet connection ... that basic operations in the app itself fail or lag due to slow internet. The background maps (and the mission I planned on my PC at home the night before) did come up on the ipad in the field, so the connection was there at least at times.

My colleague has a verizon work phone, but it looks like tethering is an extra option that isn't activated/available for it. Generally verizon has better wide area coverage around here, but I can only afford t-mobile for my own personal phone. I was surprised though, I had flown several other locations in this general area without any network/connectivity troubles, but this new area seemed to be in a bit spottier location.

One other dumb thing. When we were trying to get the phantom to take off, I was googling from my phone and saw someone suggest putting the ipad in airplane mode. So I did that ... and the drone deploy app behavior changed. Some things became more responsive. However it put me in a new catch-22. I was hoping to test the terrain awareness feature in this area so I had turned on that switch in the PC/web mission planner at home the night before. When the ipad was in airplane mode, the app reported it wouldn't let me take off because it couldn't fetch the terrain data. However, when I tried to turn the terrain awareness switch back off, it wouldn't actually turn off (presumably because it couldn't send the message to the cloud to turn it off?) So I was still screwed. When I was tethered on the internet connection, the terrain awareness icon on the DD ipad app wasn't even showing up as an option and it just flew the fixed altitude I set on the first two flights. When I went to airplane mode, the terrain awareness icon magically appeared and then wouldn't work. When I turned the tethering back on, the terrain awareness icon disappeared so I couldn't even select it to try to turn it off ... <sigh>

And this stuff always happens when the civilian observers are there to check out how things work. I had to say: trust me, usually something glitches in one of the pieces on one of the drones, but usually not everything glitching on every drone!

 

[BigAl07]

I've got an operation early in the morning requiring DroneDeploy and I just got word it's got minimal cellular connectivity. Now I'm off to research Caching DD ahead of time.

Thank you @clolsonus for sharing your "problems" as you may have just saved me (and our Emergency Services team) a lot of trouble in the morning. We have a massive landslide to document that is affecting many homes/people.

Well done sir

 

[Dave Pitman]

Has anyone seen anything like this before? Is there any quick tips or suggestions I could have done to work around the problem and maximize my time, my batteries, and the area I want to cover?

Sorry for your woes, Curt. It's a fairly well documented problem in DD starting with v. 4
DD is aware of the problem and after a month of claiming that nothing is wrong, they now have said they have identified the issue and are currently working to correct it. You could probably get a pre v.4 version of DD that does not have the problem on android (an APK) but for ios, it is more complicated to roll back.

So, the best you could do is to use a different control app until DD gets it together.

Some reference for you, and others.

DroneDeploy Pre-v4.2 Lag/Freeze/Crash (Latest Interface)

I second Dave’s request for DD to provide previous working version in the interim; I know for us that mobile version 3.6 was working since we still have a iPad operating this version successfully. iPad Air (1st gen): iOS 12.4.3 DD error version: 4.0.0 (have not flown DD missions on iPads...

forum.dronedeploy.com

DroneDeploy iOS Version 4.2 Bugs

@Andrew_Fraser Now that their has been an update I am moving to a new thread. My experience this morning, not good. probably the most notorius construction project in Austin right now and my DA tried to fly it with the new 4.2 version of the DroneDeploy App. 32ac Foootball Stadium, yes -...

forum.dronedeploy.com

 

[clolsonus]

Sorry for your woes, Curt. It's a fairly well documented problem in DD starting with v. 4
DD is aware of the problem and after a month of claiming that nothing is wrong, they now have said they have identified the issue and are currently working to correct it. You could probably get a pre v.4 version of DD that does not have the problem on android (an APK) but for ios, it is more complicated to roll back.

So, the best you could do is to use a different control app until DD gets it together.

Some reference for you, and others.

DroneDeploy Pre-v4.2 Lag/Freeze/Crash (Latest Interface)

I second Dave’s request for DD to provide previous working version in the interim; I know for us that mobile version 3.6 was working since we still have a iPad operating this version successfully. iPad Air (1st gen): iOS 12.4.3 DD error version: 4.0.0 (have not flown DD missions on iPads...

forum.dronedeploy.com

DroneDeploy iOS Version 4.2 Bugs

@Andrew_Fraser Now that their has been an update I am moving to a new thread. My experience this morning, not good. probably the most notorius construction project in Austin right now and my DA tried to fly it with the new 4.2 version of the DroneDeploy App. 32ac Foootball Stadium, yes -...

forum.dronedeploy.com

Hi Dave,

Wow, thanks for the links to the drone deploy forum. I'm not sure if it makes me feel better or worse that I'm not the only one dealing with this mess. I can tell you that it sucks to go out and fly for a county representative and every one walks away at the end of the day thinking I'm a complete moron because after an hour of poking at my (one year old) ipad I couldn't figure out how to get the drone to even take off. (Turns out issues with the updated app.) I started using DD's app because my first tests of pix4d's planning app seemed to have even more connection issues (at the time I was testing) and DD seemed to generate tidier flight plans. I've also flown with Sentera's planning app (field agent) and that had significant app-related issues at the time as well, it would *often* leave my drone hovering at a waypoint and it wouldn't proceed ever ... I would have to call it home from the hand controller. (Sometimes it wouldn't even show the buttons for drawing a route so you'd just sit there thinking ... huh???) Pix4d and sentera apps probably have updates, but I hate being a beta tester. This time of year we might get one ok day to fly every 2 weeks, and I drive 3 hours to the site and then everything works different and blows up because my devices updated their apps automatically. Ughhh .... !!!!

I like the ability to plan out flights on my desktop PC with a big screen and an accurate mouse pointer .... and then have those show up on my device when I go out to fly. I hate planning flights on little screens trying to drag around polygon control points with my fat sticky finger. Am I asking too much of the world for something that just does the basic stuff and works!?!?!?

Sorry, I'm just complaining.

I don't want to sound too critical. I write software for a living and I know it's hard to do well, but I also understand that if there isn't a culture of rock solid bug free performance, then issues do creep in unchecked and the results get messier and messier and issues harder and harder to find. Maybe I need to go hunt for a better functioning flight planning app (for aerial mapping)?

I shouldn't post first thing in the morning before coffee!!!!

 

[Mavic Mac]

I've also flown with Sentera's planning app (field agent) and that had significant app-related issues at the time as well, it would *often* leave my drone hovering at a waypoint and it wouldn't proceed ever ... I would have to call it home from the hand controller. (Sometimes it wouldn't even show the buttons for drawing a route so you'd just sit there thinking ... huh???) Pix4d and sentera apps probably have updates, but I hate being a beta tester. This time of year we might get one ok day to fly every 2 weeks, and I drive 3 hours to the site and then everything works different and blows up because my devices updated their apps automatically. Ughhh .... !!!!

I shouldn't post first thing in the morning before coffee!!!!

Greetings Curt

Just curious which version of Sentera's Field Agent you had problems with ? And here is your coffee

 

[clolsonus]

Greetings Curt

Just curious which version of Sentera's Field Agent you had problems with ? And here is your coffee

View attachment 2106

Thanks for the coffee, I do feel a little better now. Hmm, I don't know specific version numbers of the app but I can tell you the approximate time frame.

I should preface my comments by saying I really like Sentera, I know quite a few people that work there, they are a local company and a really good group of folks. We own one of their multispectral cameras, they have a slick way of marrying their cameras to dji drones, I have flown their camera extensively for one of our university projects. It works well as advertised.

(Also, you don't need to use the sentera field agent planning app to fly with the sentera camera ... DD has a button for planning flights that are sentera camera friendly for example.)

All that said, hitting software glitches in the field is frustrating and really bugs me! (especially when they make you look like a moron in front of your colleagues or the land owner, customer, etc.)

I don't know exactly, but it was probably in October of 2019 when I got frustrated and decided to switch away from the field agent mission planning/flying app. I understand they rolled out a new version since then (or were planning to?) but I have limited time and resources, I get split between several projects, I don't always have time to test everything. I just need something that works. So in early November when we got our Mavic, I tried both DD and pix4d (which are both free and both support ios & android) and decided that the DD app seemed to be working well enough. (Except for my last time out was a disaster with the latest versions which is why I started this thread.)

Here were my issues with field agent (maybe all resolved in the latest version, I don't know, I haven't tried flying with it since last october.)

1. The main problem was that frequently I would send the drone out on it's flight and it would stop at one of the earliest waypoints in the mission and just hover there forever. I've wasted precious batteries coming back, restarting, coming back, restarting, and couldn't get past the first waypoint. Then mysteriously it starts to work again and everything is fine for the rest of the session.

2. The other issue was that the app would start up, but never present me with the buttons to plan the route, I would just sit there with no ability to go forward. The advice was to double tap the ipad button to bring up the thumbnails of all your running apps, and then swipe them all off the screen to get rid of them and restart the app. This works sometimes, but not always. I've tried rebooting the ipad, restarting the app, iterating a dozen times, and then magically it comes back and starts working again. I've spent 30 minutes trying to get the app to work while my phantom battery is running down idling on the ground.

These sorts of things frustrate the heck out of me because I drive hours to the site with 3 batteries and one of them gets wasted going out and and back and just hovering at the first waypoint ... or 10-15% of a battery gets wasted as I fiddle with the ipad restarting the app and rebooting.

3. When we got our mavic I discovered the provided cables and hand controller layout just didn't physically work with our ipad mini. There's probably ways to make it work, but it the path of least resistance was to pull my phone out of my pocket and just use that. So I have been flying our mavic with my personal android phone. However, field agent only supports ios, so I've never been able to fly our mavic with field agent.

Those are my gripes with the sentera field agent app. Hopefully they are all resolved in their latest version, but I haven't had a chance to circle back around and test it due to my own time limitations, and now that we use both android and ios on a single day, it's nice to have the same app support both.

Curt.

 

[Fred Garvin]

Curt,

Sorry about your troubles....but yes, we all have “one of those days”. Yesterday, my aircraft (Typhoons and M2P) flew brilliantly....no issues.....however.....

I drove nearly 2 hours way out to the boonies for a new reservoir being built. My mission was to image back basin areas not yet cleared of trees and brush, so fish habitat can be planned. No roads, just 4 wheeler and dirt bike trails. Miles and miles, acres and acres of raw, rough country. I drive a Jeep, so a day spent in 4H and a few creek crossings in 4L, all with tossing and bouncing. I probably hiked a total of 4 miles as well. It was an exhausting day to say the least.

I bid too low. No wonder I got the job. Not time wise, but I seriously underestimated the effort involved. My Jeep needs a thorough cleaning. I’m sore all over. So far, I count 7 chigger bites...tough day. On a good note, I sure slept well last night, even with the chigger bites.

 

[Mavic Mac]

Curt,

Sorry about your troubles....but yes, we all have “one of those days”. Yesterday, my aircraft (Typhoons and M2P) flew brilliantly....no issues.....however.....

I drove nearly 2 hours way out to the boonies for a new reservoir being built. My mission was to image back basin areas not yet cleared of trees and brush, so fish habitat can be planned. No roads, just 4 wheeler and dirt bike trails. Miles and miles, acres and acres of raw, rough country. I drive a Jeep, so a day spent in 4H and a few creek crossings in 4L, all with tossing and bouncing. I probably hiked a total of 4 miles as well. It was an exhausting day to say the least.

I bid too low. No wonder I got the job. Not time wise, but I seriously underestimated the effort involved. My Jeep needs a thorough cleaning. I’m sore all over. So far, I count 7 chigger bites...tough day. On a good note, I sure slept well last night, even with the chigger bites.

Fred
Hopefully all of your videos/pictures came out ok and you don't have to do a repeat trip.

I know what you are going through with the chigger bites. We had a cat get spooked and escape last August. I spent a few days searching the neighborhood fields for her. I ended up with dozen of chigger bites - not fun !

 

[clolsonus]

Fred
Hopefully all of your videos/pictures came out ok and you don't have to do a repeat trip.

I know what you are going through with the chigger bites. We had a cat get spooked and escape last August. I spent a few days searching the neighborhood fields for her. I ended up with dozen of chigger bites - not fun !

I thought you were going to say that you ended with a dozen cats, not a dozen chigger bites!

For me, half the fun is the adventure. I've had the opportunity to sail on a NOAA research ship up 1000 nm north of Hawaii into the great pacific garbage patch to do aerial imaging off a ship. And a couple weeks ago we hiked into a state park towing our gear on a sled. This week I was flying from a cul-de-sac at the end of a street at the top of a bluff. While we had the phantom sitting in the middle of the cul-de-sac doing battle with the DD app, a newspaper delivery guy drove down the street towards and passed by really close to our drone. As he drove by he rolled down the window, smiled, and said "crunch". He was joking (I hope) and missed us our phantom by about 10', but fun times!

Curt.

 

[R Martin]

Curt,

Sorry about your troubles....but yes, we all have “one of those days”. Yesterday, my aircraft (Typhoons and M2P) flew brilliantly....no issues.....however.....

I drove nearly 2 hours way out to the boonies for a new reservoir being built. My mission was to image back basin areas not yet cleared of trees and brush, so fish habitat can be planned. No roads, just 4 wheeler and dirt bike trails. Miles and miles, acres and acres of raw, rough country. I drive a Jeep, so a day spent in 4H and a few creek crossings in 4L, all with tossing and bouncing. I probably hiked a total of 4 miles as well. It was an exhausting day to say the least.

I bid too low. No wonder I got the job. Not time wise, but I seriously underestimated the effort involved. My Jeep needs a thorough cleaning. I’m sore all over. So far, I count 7 chigger bites...tough day. On a good note, I sure slept well last night, even with the chigger bites.

So, what was the downside? Sounds like a typical day except for the chiggers. State doesn't issue those to u....

 

[clolsonus]

Update: I upgraded the drone deploy app on my ipad to version 4.2.1 (released 6 days ago). It just made things even worse. I'm trying to run it from home on my home wifi so internet connectivity is not the issue. I can move the map around but the rest of the app seems to become unresponsive after a few moments. I really like that I can plan flights on any device and they show up on all my other devices, but right now the app is completely unflyable on my ipad. (Ipad mini 4 purchased about a year ago.) If the advice is to buy a new ipad every time DD rolls out a new version of their app, that's not going to work for me.

I just loaded up pix4d's map planner and that is snappy and responsive. I just fired up sentera's field agent app, and at a first glance, that also seems much improved .. also snappy and responsive and intuitive on the ipad ... I want to like DD's app, but the latest DD updates have turned the app into a brick for me. :-(

Edit: as of 1 day ago on the dd forums, dd is promising a version 4.2.2 that fixes some of the issues. I don't know if this is a super random/rare issue that only affects a few people and is hard to find, or DD is just playing it all down because no commercial company wants to look this bad. Here's hoping the next release starts bending the bugginess curve back towards the positive direction. I was going to run out and test the pix4d mission planner app, but it's 3F here this morning ... uff-dah!

 

[Fred Garvin]

So, what was the downside? Sounds like a typical day except for the chiggers. State doesn't issue those to u....

Bid too low for the effort involved.....(and I’m up to 11 chigger bites)

 

[Dave Pitman]

I don't know if this is a super random/rare issue that only affects a few people and is hard to find, or DD is just playing it all down because no commercial company wants to look this bad.

Their claim that it only effects relatively few is not very believable. And be advised that the claim that the next version is the fix has been used the last couple of versions. AND, they still say that you need a new (powerful) device. NOT encouraging when, as you could see my comment, the last 3.x version did, and still does, work just fine.

They have done something that is a drain on the processor or creates a memory leak that quickly degrades performance until it quits. DD's desktop integrations is very nice, and their app GUI is nice too. But all that is out the window if the app can't fulfill it's primary task, unfortunately.

I would suggest using a different app, even (gasp) a paid one. It's worth the piece of mind. And, what's that saying that if you keep doing the same thing that doesn't work expecting a different result??

 

[R Martin]

Bid too low for the effort involved.....(and I’m up to 11 chigger bites)

Vaseline and/or a blowtorch will fix those. And of course a lot of scratching. As an afterthought, I have a deal for you. We have a remote location west of DTO that is head-high grass, snakes, water hazards and tons of relatives of the little critters gnawing on your legs....interested? You could plan a family reunion.....

 

[R Martin]

Their claim that it only effects relatively few is not very believable. And be advised that the claim that the next version is the fix has been used the last couple of versions. AND, they still say that you need a new (powerful) device. NOT encouraging when, as you could see my comment, the last 3.x version did, and still does, work just fine.

They have done something that is a drain on the processor or creates a memory leak that quickly degrades performance until it quits. DD's desktop integrations is very nice, and their app GUI is nice too. But all that is out the window if the app can't fulfill it's primary task, unfortunately.

I would suggest using a different app, even (gasp) a paid one. It's worth the piece of mind. And, what's that saying that if you keep doing the same thing that doesn't work expecting a different result??

My understanding is Pix4D Capture is free. Might look into it. I used it for the Inspire and had good results with it.

 

[clolsonus]

My understanding is Pix4D Capture is free. Might look into it. I used it for the Inspire and had good results with it.

Yes, I tested pix4d capture with our mavic running on android and it worked pretty ok, but I did have trouble with the video freezing and there was some weird setup/usb issues on android I had to discover the hard way and learn about. If a message pops up on android and asks which app to use with the usb device, always go with "just once" and never select "always" because you'll never run any other app (like the dji go app to calibrate the compass) until you go deep in the settings and clear out that choice. At the time (before the current DD fiasco) I felt like DD's mission planning app was more robust. I also felt like DD did a bit better and creating evenly spaced shot locations. But now I have pix4d loaded back up and plan to test it as soon as I get a break in the weather and my schedule. We put so much trust and faith into these commercial tools and sometimes they just aren't always that great. But the DIY community is out of style for the most part and you can't build your own 20 megapixel camera on a near perfectly smooth gimbal at the size and cost dji delivers, probably not even close, especially if you pay yourself $0.50/hr for your time designing and building and iterating on it.