Using DroneDeploy in windy conditions (tip / feedback)

Flight - Discussion and Q&A
1

Hi all - I was flying a large area mission today, the wind was maybe 15mph max and had a large effect on two things which new pilots need to be aware of.

  1. Firstly I didn’t take the wind into account when planning the survey from the comfort of my home. What actually happened is that I set the first capture point as the furthest away from me so that the aircraft would work its way back to me. However the head wind meant that the aircraft had a low ground speed and lost more than 10% battery power just getting to the first waypoint. It meant I had to abandon the mission near to the end, swap batteries, then re-plan the (relatively small) area it had missed.

  2. The DroneDeploy software must use an interval timer to determine the gap between pictures. In other words, all the front overlap that you set is all over the place when you’re flying in the real world with wind. It has the effect of taking less pictures per area when travelling with the wind, and taking almost double when heading into the wind. This effect is obviously because of the speed difference. This surprised me.
    I’ve uploaded a screenshot of the actual number of photos the software took and it’s easy to see where it was heading into the wind (travelling east) or with the wind (travelling west).

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DroneDeploy wind affecting density.JPG1145×502 115 KB

2

Thats funny…you can totally see the alternating flight paths. I guess in this situation you would want to change the flightpath direction to be flying in a crosswind maybe. So north/south in this situation vs east/west.

3

Had the exact same thing in 15-20 mph winds today with the p4pro… mine was only a demo, but still. I watched the drone speed while flying and noticed it was just under 30 mph with the wind at my back and around 18 mph against the wind

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blob.jpg2560×1440 1.6 MB

4

Anyone have any update about this in 2019 ?
Thanks

5

Yes, DroneDeploy moved from an interval to a predetermined GPS located waypoint so this should not happen. Or if it does then it shouldn’t be near as bad. There are reports of missing or uneven image spacing on the Phantom 4 Pro. You can search those terms.

6

Ok, i fly a Mavic 2 pro so i guess i won’t have the bug you said.
Thanks for the answer !

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7

A couple of questions on this:

  1. How/when do you choose your start point?
  2. How can you change the direction of the flight so it would be N/S instead of E/W?
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8

You can change direction of the flight in “Advanced”, you will find “Flight Direction”. You can adjust it even offline, i use it often (fly sideway).
About changing starting point, i have not found how to do that (in Advanced you can choose wich waypoint you start from, but it will ignore those before…)

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