This might not be a bug report but instead a user error. When I flew a mission yesterday the mission had a battery change in it approximately 80% of the way through the mission. After the battery change for some reason my exposure shifted to begin producing a much darker image. I have seen a few forum posts detailing issues with battery changes but only one with an exposure issue and that post was really old. Here’s what I’m flying with:
- Drone Depoly version: 2.0.45
- DJI Go 4 v. 4.1.0(87gp-phone)
- DJI Mavic Pro (with latest firmware according to the DJI go app - if needed I can check the version * number but I don’t want to get the drone out right now)
- Phone: OnePlus 2
- Android v. 6.0.1
Now here are all the relevant actions I took yesterday with my flight:
- Formatted the SD Card via DJI go app
- Flew up to 400 feet with the DJI go app tapped the screen to focus properly
- Checked that all camera settings were on auto
- landed, swapped batter for a completely fresh one, Powered on the Mavic.
- Opened the Drone Deploy app, made final adjustments to flightplan and launched Mavic as normal
- Mavic flew 80% of mission Then when battery got to 30% it initiated a return to home sequence and landed due to low battery
- I powered off the drone, Swapped the battery and powered it back on
- I closed the screen telling me to upload images on the Drone Deploy app and reselected the mission and pressed resume (at no point did I close the app or re-open the DJI-go App)
- The flight resumed as normal only the images where drastically darker.
- Got home and attempted to create a map using both Drone Deploy and Pix4D mapper, Drone Deploy failed and Pix4D created a map but of course 20% of the map is darker than the rest.
I thought the potential cause might be that a cloud moved between the sun and the area being mapped, but there were very few big clouds actually blocking a lot of light. So I investigated further. I looked into the EXIF data for the jpgs on both the dark images and the bright images and I found something weird, the shutter speed for the bright images was a very odd number. While the dark image had a normal shutter speed.
I’m not really sure what to make of this, Did I do something wrong in the battery changing process? Were the exposure settings somehow incorrect on the first portion of the missing and then corrected themselves for the second bit?
Here is a link to a google drive folder that has 3 jpgs taken in sequence (before dead battery, during landing for battery change and after battery swap). I also included in that folder a snapshot of some of the EXIF data, and the Pix4D map quality report. Any help or insight you can give would be greatly appreciated!
Hey Charlie, sounds a little like my problem, can you check your DJI Go 4 app to see if it has forced the camera mode back to manual…(I’m just curious)
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Just powered up my drone to check and indeed DJI go had set the camera settings to Manual. I thought that maybe the DJI go app setting the image capture to manual automatically on boot but I just re-set the camera settings to auto, turned off the drone and turned it back on and the camera settings were still on manual.
Why did you ask? Did that happen to you where the camera settings got flipped to Manual?
Yes mine seems to be forced back to manual when I hit the fly button in DD.
It could be 2 things, the recent DD update, or the recent android 6.0.1 update.
I really have to switch off my auto updates, as all was sweet before then.
(DJI Go 4 updated over the weekend I’ll go and see if it makes a difference)
I don’t think I can help you narrow it down as this was the first battery change mission I have flown. I didn’t have this issue before though on any of my single battery flights. I’ve been using android 6.0.1 the whole time.
Last night I got an email from drone deploy, Over 50 hours after I uploaded the images they managed to stitch together the map. However it of course looks like 20% of the map is in a shadow because of the exposure change.
Unfortunately, the same thing happened to me yesterday with a P4P. Good exposure for 1st battery then after landing and switching out battery and resuming flight without closing DD or opening Go4. During the second half of mission, I noticed images were being overexposed. I let it finish and corrected images in Lightroom. The cameras had switched to manual and F stop went from 5.6 to 2.8 thereby overexposing by two stops.
It would be nice to be able to make camera settings during a DD mission. Is this possible?
I guess I will be going with manual settings in the future.
Hi @Dennis_O_Hara,
Can you clarify if your camera settings are switching from manual to auto or auto to manual?
Keep me posted,
Christina
We’re looking into this issue to see why continue missions are causing exposure changes on Android.
Camera settings switched from auto to manual with the same Settings as auto except the F-stop switched from 5.6 to 2.8 which of course overexposed all the images taken during the second battery flight. I was able to correct it back using Lightroom, but, wondering if I could have switched exposure during the flight using the thumbwheel…
Hi @Dennis_O_Hara,
Can you verify that you have disabled the Automatic Camera settings in the DroneDeploy app as well?
Keep me posted,
Christina
I assume that I did not disable the Auto feature – this may have been the issue.
Thanks