Big test today with my P3 at a power plant mapping coal pile, ash pond, etc. Windy at 15 mph and everything went great! Typical flights were 300 - 400 ft AGL with 70 and 60 % overlap. But now I’m back at the office, it looks like the overlap didn’t work well. There are large gaps going downwind (at 34 mph) and dense overlap heading upwind (about 11 mph). See image. I’m glad this was a test and not a job. I’m concerned about the stitching.
I did notice, later, that from the DJI app, the camera was set to take photos at 5 second intervals. I hope that did not affect the Drone Deploy overlap setting. Is it possibly a slow microSD card? Any suggestions?
Otherwise. I’m extrememly pleased with the flights today. I even had to switch batteries in the middle of a flight and it worked well… I think. I haven’t seen the processed results yet.
Thanks.
I don’t think that photo is from the dronedeploy app. Are you sure you used it during this flight?
Good observation. The image is from the Pix4D program. I used Drone Deploy to fly the pattern and process the results which ended up looking very nice. I also used Pix4D just to compare the results. None-the-less, why isn’t the upwind and downwind overlap more uniform? Did DroneDeploy maybe decide to do a minimum of 70%?
DroneDeploy does decide the max speed that it should go based on the frontlap. We don’t slow down the camera around the corners and we also don’t account for possibly slowing down due to wind. Could those sections have had more wind somehow?
Yes. There was a good 15mph constant wind from the west. The P3 flew about 34mph down wind and 11 to 15 mph upwind. So, you’re saying, the 70% overlap was kept as a minimum. I’m good with that. Afterall, the map turned out well. Thanks.
@chasemgray, any chance of giving us the option to slow the speed down some? 34 mph seems excessive sometimes and could compromise image quality.
With a proper shutter speed, the speed shouldn’t affect image quality. If the shutter speed is fast enough (1/200+), the image below will not have moved significantly given it’s altitude to cause blur.
We will provide the option to restrict the max speed in the near future also.