Problems with Synced Flights

Flight - Discussion and Q&A
1

So I was in Northern California on Tuesday taking some maps of powerplants for work.

The area is heavily wooded and the Terrain Is extremely varied. I knew this before hand and pulled up Google Earth and used it to visualize and take rough Elevations of the areas I was planning to fly while planning the flights on PC at my office desk I had about 8 Flights ready to go with Elevations and Overlaps carefully planned to ensure coverage, and to avoid flying into hillsides. Everything was set to go. Booted up my Android Nexus 9 running 6.0.1, and synced the flights.

Usually, on the web interface, it will show synced. But for a lot of those flights, that never showed up, but the flights were indeed synced. However I had no way of knowing that because I wasn’t close enough to the flight areas to view them on the Tablet. Furthermore, I had no way of knowing that they were synced until I was onsite, with the drone, and connected the the drone. That workflow in my opinion is in no way optimized. I know the Android Platform is being developed at drown deploy, but there is no reason whatsoever that I should not be able view what flights are currently on stored on Device.

The second issue is the real problem here though. Once I started flying, I realized that I would have adjust some of the elevation and overlap parameters after one flight didn’t go as planned. That was when I realized that during my Third flight, which had the most outlier Elevation and overlap values do to the massive elevation difference that was planning on being covered, close to 700 feet from take of location to the lowest point in the valley below, I opened the settings on APP and adjusted a few of the parameters, and to my horror, EVERY FLIGHT AFTER THAT INHERITED THOSE VALUES!!!

This has never happened to me before. Now again, I know the Android APP is undergoing heavy development, but there is no reason it should ever get worse than it was before. This is simple functionality that should be guaranteed.

2

greg, everytime I plan any desktop flights,. the height is never saved to the phone. I went thru what you saw. Its like I have to always go to settings on the phone and if the height is 250 it does that same height no matter what. kinda annoying, since I spent alot of time planning on the desktop, etc etc. but you will notice that if your phone app height is at a certain feet, it doesnt matter what you plan on the browser. I like the browser planning since you can comfortably zoom in and really edit the area , compared to doing it on the phone. but then it doesnt matter about things and then you end up having to draw the grid from the phone when an error happens. ive messaged them about this numerous of times and gave up. I one time spent an enitre day planning 5 locations, and spent time trimming as much area not needed, etc from the PC, since it was easier from 27 inch monitor… but then the next day in the field i had to use my tiny phone in the sun glare. (homer simpson DOH very LOUD)

3

Bumping this thread for visibility.

@chasemgray @jono

4

Thanks for bumping this @Gregory_Veizades - sorry to hear you were having these issues!

We’re indeed working on better syncing of plan settings (overlap, altitude etc.) between web and mobile, and we’re also working on a much better way to visualize which plans have been successfully synced on the device without having to be in the field.

These changes will be out in the next month or so.

5

Thanks for the reply.

I read in a few posts that there is “BETA” Version of the new android app. Anyway I could get an invite?