Can you please confirm whether or not DroneDeploy needs to have a communication link to a DJI Phantom 3 (or any other DJI drones) after take off? Will the drone continue on the mission, taking photos as planned if it goes out of communication range? If so will it initiate return to home at a preset battery level?
Cheers
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It needs a connection before as it reaches its first waypoint in order to make sure that photo capture starts successfully.
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This was a good question! What has your experience been thus far?
once, when I lost radio connection, my P3Adv stopped capturing photos. Don’t know if this is a current problem yet
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We’ve seen this happen with the new SDK. Our team has put in a fix which is going out soon.
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The fix will be welcomed! Yes I’ve seen the problems, it will continue the mission and collect data, but it will not continue the mission in the correct point if you are doing multiple battery missions. There’s a way around this, I spent days trying to capture a mere 300ac.
Hi, Phantom 3/4/Inspire1 must have communication link all the flight. Don’t remember regarding other DJI drones. Reason is simple - they can’t trigger camera by distance or by time, DroneDeploy app controls camera dynamically from the ground. In UgCS we are doing the same. The only robust approach is generate flight plan with waypoints for each shot, but for quite big areas you can meet maximum waypoints limit of autopilot. I don’t sure that DroneDeploy can make such flight plan, but UgCS can.
Dronedeploy doesn’t need a connection during the flight. The camera triggering is based on time. It just needs a connection at the moment to start the camera at the first waypoint. Otherwise it should work fine.
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Hello guys. If the drone lost connection will keep on the mission. But if the drone connect again will stop taking pictured even will keep flying the mission.
Do you use startShootPhoto/stopShootPhoto SDK methods? We use the same. But if user (in UgCS) selects that he wants to make photos only on forward passes (to not make unnecessary photos) UgCS will require constant link. Otherwise everything will be the same.
Yes. We don’t handle the forward pass only case. Those can be filtered out later and dronedeploy has some features coming that will help do that before uploading. There is no reason to worry about it while flying because like you said it now adds a requirement to remain connected which is far from ideal.