Mavic Android Bugs

I am new to Drone Deploy and have struck several annoying issues while evaluating it . I am using a DJI Mavic (firmware .800) and Android DroneDeply software on a Samsung S7 edge running android 7. I have been trying to map parts of a farm from 400’.

My issues are Primarily camera and image related: 1) Gimbal failing to point down and 2) the FPV window not displaying in the interface. Both are reasons to abort the mission and are most frustrating. as I only have 3 batteries.

Initially I attempted using Auto Camera Settings. However when I land, change battery and go to continue from a different take off point the mission, the camera seemingly Auto resets to a different shutter speed and the two sets of images are mismatched. So this rules out Auto settings for all but single battery missions.

So instead I elected to use manual camera settings. Watched a tutorial, send drone up to 400’ and carefully set the camera in DJIGo using histogram, 100ISO and white balance to taste. . Exited DJIGo, Launched Drone Deploy and proceeded on two battery mission over 130 acres. After battery change I do not revisit DJIGo. I simply launch DroneDeploy and tell it to continue mission. Second half of mission commences with NO FPV window! So I have no way of knowing if exposure is decent or even if the gimbal is vertical. Mission completes, Drone comes home and I notice gimbal is horizontal. So I sweat in fear of a ruined mission due camera on the wrong axis. Fortunately it turns out this time it is OK and I end up with vertical images. On several occasions now I have had the FPV window go AWOL with no obvious means to recover it!

On a separate mission I take off with a an ND16 filter fitted on a clear sunny day Again I take off and manually set things up in DJIGo4 having ascended to 400’ to do so. I ended up with a slow shutter speed of 1/30 due to the ND filter. Anyhow I switch to DroneDeploy, launch the Manual Camera Settings mission and shortly after the FPV window opening the display goes extremely dark. I can only assume Dronedeploy over rides the manual camera settings and forced a minimum shutter speed of 1/60 or similar? So abort mission. Land having wasted 30% of battery and set off again without ND filter and new battery. Manual settings work for first half of mission. Land at low battery. Swap batteryb and continue mission. Drone deploy refuses to tilt camera down and commences taking images mission with horizontal camera. Fortunately FPV window is in view so abort mission. Quit DD toggle to DJIGo4 and stop camera from taking images. Several attempts to restart DD mission from hover at 400’ eventually lead to it tilting the camera down and completing the mission.

It would seem an improvement if the camera settings in use were displayed on the DD interface, even without the means to change them, being able to observe and not them down would be super handy. Especially when using manual settings, this would enable to me to ensure subsequent mission segments end up compatible, prior to competing them. At present it is a gamble for me.

If I launch a mission and it starts taking images with the gimbal horizontal, what am I supposed to do next? There is not obvious path to recovery.
As I did not wish to continue the mission with images incorrectly orientated I aborted it. I then wish to restart afresh. So seemingly copying the mission whilst inflight seemed like a good idea. However the copy gets the same name! How about appending number to the end of copies so they can be differentiated? So newly copied mission gets under way and proceeds to battery change. Now I have two potential continue candidates with identical names. So trial and error leads me to the version that is half way though. Less than ideal.

Another less significant but confusing bug is the “Camera MANUAL setting, Please change camera setting in DJIGo app” dialog often pops up when setting to AUTO . This is confusing. The dialogs should be mode specific.

Obviously I am new to this but I am finding the process problematic due to what seems like bugs in the the Android app. Are these issues with failed gimbal tilt and missing FPV windows present in the IOS app?

If I cannot reliably get missions to complete I cannot see my self proceeding beyond the eval period. But I am having fun evaluating in the hope that I can work things out.