Making a large map using continue mission and Inspire or Phantom 3

In the V5 (1.0.2) release of the Inspire/P3 beta app we added functionality to let users map an area larger than a single battery will allow.

In order to use the feature you just need to do the following:

  • Create a plan of the entire area you wish to map.
  • Fly as normal and when you feel the battery is low bring the aircraft home.
  • Switch out the battery and completely restart the dronedeploy app (this will improve in future versions)
  • When the planning screen comes up again, if you wait several seconds, a right arrow should appear on the middle right side of the screen. This allows you to browse previous missions in the same area.
  • When selecting the mission it should prompt you asking whether you wish to continue this mission or start over. If you choose continue then the checklist will start right away.
  • If the checklist fails for any reason, you just need to repeat the steps above.
  • Once the checklist passes, takeoff as normal and all of the flight data should be saved to the plan you are continuing.
  • When uploading photos from the SD card, you should just need to upload as normal and we will determine the photos that belonged to that flight. (This is the area we might run into problems while we are testing this feature out). If you see anything odd, such as too few photos, make sure to contact us so we can fix it.
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Cool. Excited to try this out.

@Chase is there anything built into the app at this point that will bring the device back home automatically when the battery is getting low or is that a feature for the future?

It’s not built into the app but the phantom and inspire are pretty good at coming home on low battery.

It comes home automatically, but the feature that determines how much power it will require to come home is off by a significant margin of error.

Do you have any suggestions on improving it?

It would be nice if the return to home function flew at a faster speed, than what the survey is programmed at. One of our latest failures on the solar farm was of a large area. (see my other post) As it got further away, the RTH function of 20 percent would normally be enough, but it returns so slowly its better to use the battery time to fly more of the survey and manually fly it back faster, than the DD app is capable of doing.

Seems like the latest release has fixed the speed coming home. At least on the inspire

Agreed, we tested it.

How do create a plan? On the app or on the dronedeploy.com site? The onsite seems to not work for me.

What is happening with the on site plan creation?

You should just need to create the initial plan and then select it using the arrows on subsequent flights.

Create a large plan on the app and ignore it when it tells you that it is too big?

Do you get a warning when using the mobile app that the plan is too big?

Yes but it would seem that I can ignore the warning.

Hi Chase, I have been presented with an opportunity to provide a high resolution, seamless orthomosaic of four land masses totaling around eighty square kilometres. I have the DJI Inspire and Phantom3 pro and would like to use Dronedeploy for the job. Can Dronedeploy handle orthomosaics of this size and can I rely on the DD staff for backup when/if needed. This would be a large project for me so I need to be sure I can make it work before I enter into pricing for tenders.
DD seems to be improving all the time and would be my first choice for this task. I am really excited about this prospect and hope we can make it work.

Hi Mark,

I’d suggest to keep an eye out on our blog this coming Tuesday because we’ll be posting a case study of someone doing a very large area kind of similar to your use case.
We’d love to help you out on this but we’d also need some more details. What would be the largest single map you’d like to create? If they are multiple islands, I assume it won’t all be a single map, right? Are you going to be flying at a low altitude or are you allowed to fly over 400 feet? Our engineers/staff should be available to provide support when needed.

If you’d be interested in talking to our marketing team, we’d also love to do a blog post once you’ve finished the project.

Chase

Thanks Chase, I should ave some more details around mid December.The largest Island would be around 50 square kilometres and for now I will assume a max height of 440 feet.

after every mission I complete, RTH is initiating. I do not know why?
any info on that?
I used to switch it off and then come home or make some obsolete pictures for the mission to have a better 3D model (I hope I understood that one right in another thread)

:slight_smile:

Ah that makes sense now. We might be initiating RTH whenever the mission ends. We should be able to fix this if you switch the modes on the controller.

switch mode to “f”, correct @chasemgray?

I checked out code and I am not sure why it is RTHing when you switch modes. I’ll be looking into this some more over the next few days.