Mavic Air Compatibility with DroneDeploy

Well Litchi and Autopilot already have.

Problem with the MA however is the low resolution geo tags. DJI crippled them by rounding the LAT and LON to the nearest second. This is out of DD’s control to fix that.

Hey DD,

Pix4dcapture just released support for the Mavic Air. Just sayin… :slight_smile:

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I was wondering if it wouldn’t be possible to use the flight record data to fix the exif.

The correct coordinates are already embedded in the EXIF data, just not in the correct field or format. The data that is in the proper field has been deliberately rounded to the nearest second by DJI. One can manually fix this but it would be a major pain for lots of images.

@brantel where in the EXIF is this data? and how does one extract this. If i can correct just one photo then the rest will be georeferenced.

You have to use a EXIF editor program. There are many around the web.

If I open the images in photoshop and view the metadata I can see the following data:

drone-dji:Latitude+35.8997016</drone-dji:Latitude>
drone-dji:Longitude-83.3720444</drone-dji:Longitude>
drone-dji:AbsoluteAltitude+1.20</drone-dji:AbsoluteAltitude>
drone-dji:RelativeAltitude+46.10</drone-dji:RelativeAltitude>

exif:GPSLatitude35,53,58N</exif:GPSLatitude>
exif:GPSLongitude83,22,19W</exif:GPSLongitude>
exif:GPSAltitudeRef0</exif:GPSAltitudeRef>
exif:GPSAltitude461/10</exif:GPSAltitude>

Notice the low res GPS coordinates and the high res drone position coordinates.

What some people are doing is converting the drone position coordinates to the proper format and editing the variables in the GPS EXIF locations with the proper high res variables.

The drone knew where it was at high accuracy but DJI rounds the EXIF variables to the nearest Second.

Here is another method:

https://www.mapir.camera/blogs/guide/113243910-extracting-dji-flight-logs-for-geo-tagging-survey-images

Also, you could check out this post above:

https://forum.dronedeploy.com/t/mavic-air-compatibility-with-dronedeploy/8244/76?u=brantel

So annoying coz im using the mavic air for my thesis and dji responded to my email saying that the air cant record the accurate gps loc. So its really annoying that is in the file anyway.

Thanks

The front line of support at DJI is almost worthless. They never have the most recent or accurate info. Talk to 5 of them you will get 5 different answers.

I am new to drones, DD, and purchased a DJI Mavic Air. It is hard to describe my disappointment with the incompatibilities on what are obviously simple basic features. I just found this message board today and to read the history is very discouraging. I am not sure there is a straight story here - this seems simple and makes no sense.

I have done more experimenting with the Mavic Air trying to work around DD’s limitations here. I was able to program a mission to fly a precise grid using Litchi. I created a .csv file with longitude and latitude values and uploaded into Litche. Flying the mission I created a precise array of equally spaced and overlapping photos.

I next tried to upload these Mavic Air .JPG images to DD. DD rejected more than half reporting “invalid geographic data values”. DD did eventually make a map using a subset, but much of the array that was shot was missing. Apparently there is even something bad about the position data in the JPG files.

Approximately 250 people have tagged “me to” for DD Mavic Air support. Some of these folks like me may only have a Mavic Air and as a result will not be subscribing to DD at $1,000+ per year. I also suspect that for every person that has posted “me too” there are others that just saw that the Mavic Air was not supported by DD and did not pursue this. My guess is DD is likely missing out on $250K to $1M or more a year of revenue from potential users that only have a Mavic Air. This seems like a big missed opportunity for both DD and DJI.

I am now waiting to see what happens with the new DJI Mavic Pro “2” expected next month. I will not be buying one however unless it works with DD and Litchi. DD - are you working with DJI now to support this at release?

Pix4D recently added support for the Mavic Air with their mapping software. Unfortunately nothing DD can do with the poor low resolution geo tags that DJI has intentionaly crippled the MA with.

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I just tried Pix4D and it seems to work fine with the Mavic Air. It is listed as a supporeted drone model and the program knows the camera features of the drone. Setting I up a flight and uploaded for stitching. The entire flight flew from take off to landing with no user imput - including path, altitude, heading, gimbals control and speed. Another third party product “Litchi” also works fine in programming Mavic Air waypoint flights. I am not sure what the issue is with DD.

My “guess” is that Pix4D flies well as the coordinates uploaded are accurate and the drone can follow these positions accurately even if they dumb down the detail in posting positions to the image files. As to stitching. I suspect Pic4D relys on visual matching and the GPS data does not matter much. They may induce some errors in absolute actual position, but they also allow for GCPs (ground control points that have accurately know GPS coordinates to as accurate as 1 cm) so you can tell Pix4D exactly where certain positions in the models are in real space.

In summary, it seems like the Mavic Air is pretty much fully operational for mapping and can be readily and accurate flown using apps like Litchi and Pix4D.

I think the Mavic is just fine for modeling. Accurately mapping is a different thing. Any of those flight planning softwares can make nice models. Litchi is beyond the other two in capability, but DroneDeploy is quickly catching up. I am doing some beta testing a hexacopter that uses Pix4D Capture and it is becoming dated. Pix4D support is not stellar so you likely won’t see as many improvements.

Hi Christina,
You have news?

Hi @Gustavo_Michelini,

No news or updates to share but I can assure you that an announcement will be made if anything changes.

Cheers,
Christina

Hi…

I have to ask :slight_smile: any news :slight_smile:

No news to share at this time…I promise pages will be updated as soon as we have something to share.

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So now it shows Mavic Air is supported, is this true?

Hi @jsandgren10,

We’ve started rolling out updates to users for Mavic Air support. If you don’t see the update yet, I suggest waiting a couple days or so. :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Christina

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Thank you - now I can begin surveying with my new air!