After a battery change is it possible to pick your starting way point anymore to continue the mission? In the past when the drone wanted to come home to change batteries in the middle of strip I would take control and manually fly the rest of the leg so I wouldn’t have duplicate pictures or missing pictures if I chose to fly the next way point or the previous way point. Now when I do that the only option I see is Continue Flight and it does not even give me the option of what way point I would like to start at. I see some people have found a solution to this by just copying the flight plan and then changing your starting way point but this is a little trickier to do because the dashed line that drone flew in the past is not there so it is hard to figure out which way point you left off on. Then you would also have two flight plans for the same flight and have your flight logs in different locations and the live map feature also would not work as well. Just wondering if I am missing something or if this is the only way you can continue your flight after a battery swap. I liked in the past when it had dashed lines showing where you have already flown and then it had the new starting way point which you could adjust if you wanted. Made my battery usage more efficient and I never had double pictures or missing pictures. Thanks everyone.
I use a manual RTH out of the corner that I know it is not going to finish the next leg. I might have one or two duplicate images, but that is not a bad thing. It will then return automatically to that waypoint.
That works good when the drone is at the same end of the field as the home point. The problem I run into is when I have enough battery to finish a way point and end up on the other end of the field. When you change batteries the drone then has to come all the way back to the home point, land, swap batteries, and then fly all the way to the other end of the field before it starts the mission again which wastes 10% of it’s battery. I do not have a lot of batteries so I try my best to be as efficient as possible while at the same time being safe and not landing with 5% battery. On longer fields the drone will start returning to home around 30% battery so I would often fly the leg it is on manually the rest of the way or come back, land, swap batteries, and change the starting way point so I do not have to waste battery flying to the far end of the field. I would then instead start a leg on the side next to the home point and then fly the remaining leg that I skipped manually on the way back. Which is a little challenging to fly straight and I normally take a lot more photos manually than when it is flying on its own. If I have enough batteries with I think I will just end the mission on the close side of the field at a higher battery percentage and just swap to avoid the issue. Thanks for the suggestion Michael!
I totally understand that and agree that there is a better method to be used. This is also part of the reason that I try to setup as close to the center of the job as possible. My multi-battery flights usually end up in close proximity to my home point. Also, I have to be careful to maintain VLOS because some of our projects can get quite large.
The preferred method would be to return to the last photo taken like Litchi does.
That is a good suggestion and I will do my best to set up my home point in the middle of the project. Tough to do in most cases as we are using DD on the Agriculture side so flying mainly corn and soybean fields from a driveway or field approach. Yes, having the drone return to the last photo would be nice but I understand why that is not the case. I was just wondering if anyone in the community was having a similar issue and had a work around for the continue flight and selecting which way point the drone starts manually. I just recently updated the app and was surprised to see the continue flight button pop up and then have it jump straight into the checklist without having the ability to look at what you have flown so far, the live map, and edit the flight plan at all. Liked the way it was done in the older versions where you could pick the starting way point after a battery swap.
Moved to Feature Requests by Moderator.
Definitely needed for continuing as well as initials start. As I was starting a mission last week the app wanted to start at the furthest side of the map. Additionally for a two battery mission, if I need to set up in the middle of the my mission to keep LOS then it would be beneficial to say start at closest waypoint and move left and then continue in the center and move right later.
Setting up in the midpoint of the project is always recommended. Until this gets worked out remember that you can rotate the flight plan to get more efficient start and end points. Even if it is just 180 degrees.