I had assumed that the Starting Waypoint was an easy way to tell the drone where to start the full scan. I was wrong - all it does is miss out the previous waypoints.
The reason for wanting to have a different starting point was wind direction & strength - I wanted to start the mission INTO the wind and have the drone fly back to me at the end of the mission being carried with the wind. It’s happened before that I’ve run out of battery because of wind.
So is there no option to tell DD where to start flying the mission??
The option you are looking for is the flight direction slider in the mission planner. By changing this it rotates the mission flight path within the boundary.
I too like the starting point to be at the far end of the field and work my back to me as the battery depletes.
If you can you’ll always want to fly crosswind. The difference in battery performance is tremendous and if you do the math with a crosswind calculator you’ll see how important even a few degrees are. You’d think upwind/downwind runs cancel out, but it doesn’t work that way, what you need is a direct crosswind. I always check the ATIS at the local airport and move the direction slider for a direct crosswind.
If the starting point is further away from you the likelihood that you do not capture any photos increases as we need to have a good connection when the drone is starting the mission to start the photo capture. For this reason DD tries to start the drone closest to you. We figure capturing images > optimizing for battery in most cases.
Really? I didn’t know that - I thought DD ran completely autonomously i.e. if the signal was lost it made no difference as the drone flies the flight plan and saves images to the SD card, then will return & land on its own
Would that be why, when resuming a mission yesterday, it continued without taking any photos?
It’s definitely possible. The phantom 4 pro has a great feature which lets us start triggering even when disconnected. Hoping that is added to firmwares for other drones.
We’ve been considering a more ‘safe’ mode which will start capturing before mission starts, but while it’s still in the air, and verifies several camera settings before the user confirms and moves on. There might be some battery wasted during that initial confirmation step but I think it’d make things more reliable. Do you guys think that sounds useful?
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Chase, I think this would be a very useful feature. I was having trouble with the auto settings being inconsistent in DD, so I went the route of doing a pop up flight with DJI Go to manually set the camera settings. I found something interesting on my first try. I had a good looking image with DJI Go and then I landed and took off for DD mission and when it got to the first waypoint the image went very bright. I looked at my DJI Go photo info and my DD info and noticed that the good image from DJI Go had an Exposure Bias of +2.3 and a shutter speed of 1/1000. When DD got to the first waypoint, it left the Exposure Bias at +2.3, but my shutter speeds slowed down to between 1/150 and 1/200, causing really bright washed out images. I also ran the same flight with another flight software and noticed they auto set the Exposure Bias to 0.0 and I got good results. The lesson learned here is have the Exposure Bias at 0.0. Seeing that happen right after takeoff would be a nice feature to abort mission or adjust settings in the air on the way to the first waypoint, if that were another alternative.
As long as it retains between batteries for example