M100 and Inspire1

[boon.n...@gmail.com]

Over at inspire1, keep bumping into greater than 500' error message once mission started. 

Routine is only up 25ft - forward 25ft and then home & land. 

Geological location is ok. 

Over at M100, no issues in running the app. Flight mission can be initiated but map is stuck elsewhere. 

Anyone had seen these issues? 

[d...@unmannedairlines.com]

I'd like you to try something as we're getting several reports about the 500' error. The next time you're in the field simply arm your motors and then disarm them. My guess is that it's picking up a home location from a previous flight or even from running the app indoors. Test that out and let us know how it goes. 

Regarding the M100 can you share what you mean by "the map is stuck elsewhere." Thank you for the feedback. 

[boon.n...@gmail.com]

Hi mate,
Over at my inspire1, i had managed to overcome the 500' error message.
Running the apps over the PC DJI flight simulator.
Will be doing the actual flight test again.
Update u again.

Over at my M100,  This is what i had meant.
This is the map i see when i go to my mission, even thought there is clearly more than 10 Satellites reading for my location.



If i were to press to find my current location, i cannot change/refresh the map content at all.
There is not what i had observed with my inspire1 at the same location at almost the same time.

By the way, will u be able to incoporate the guidance SDK/API into the Droneblock app?
I had gotten the guidance kit mounted on my M100, i would like to co-work with an existing framework ( not reinventing the wheel) - the DroneBlock be a good platform for it.

[boon.n...@gmail.com]

By the way, i am in Singapore.
And not in China.

[d...@unmannedairlines.com]

This is really good feedback. Thank you. I see the problem based on your screenshot. Basically what is happening is the simulator uses a default location in China near DJI's headquarters. You'll need to simulate your mission somewhere near your otherwise it will default to that. You can do this be entering coordinates in your area into the simulator. That way DroneBlocks will pick up the simulated location, not China. Let me put together a video that demonstrates this concept as it will make it easier to understand.

Tell us what specifically you'd like to be able to do with DroneBlocks and the Guidance sensors? We'd certainly like to incorporate them. We're looking into doing this with the P4 too. 

[boon.n...@gmail.com]

I will give it a try for the m100 on your recommendations. 

The reason for me to question that geological location of the m100 issue is that i did the same kind of simulator with my inspire1, but the inspire 1 is able to give me the correct geological location whereas my m100 is not able to ... 

Anyway the map thingy is not a big issue. What is important is that both of the aircraft are able to do the flight mission via dB app. 

As for the guidance to be used sensibly( GPS waypoints from start to destination), it will be great if u be able to incoporate the guidance function into the dB app, example if obstacle sensed, the m100 can either hover for 5sec , change your nose facing(yaw 90)  or change your altitude; eg go back to its previous heading and try forward flight again. Or simply to try its original flight path till there is no obstacle, like a mice and maze game.Or even work with its stereo cameras to look out for openings. or even leverage on its onboard camera to use footage as an info in guiding the flight of the aircraft out of the obstacle. I knew that it might sound far-fetched, that is just my wish list; and i believe it is a wishlist for many fliers out there. That will be fully self driving ... 

I am not a mobile app developer in IOS but i do have some eclipse android app development know-how, in no way near to swift programming. So it will be great if we can work together to incoporate the guidance and GPS (Waypoints) into the dB. 

[d...@unmannedairlines.com]

We are working on support for GPS waypoints. We just want to do it in a way that is user-friend and in a block format, similar to all the other blocks you've seen. If you have any ideas we'd love to hear them. Also, it's great to hear you're a mobile developer. If you'd like to help contribute to the code let me know and we can discuss. We want to make DroneBlock open source, but right now we're focusing on getting a good version 1.0 before we do.

[boon.n...@gmail.com]

Hi, the DroneDeploy ( https://www.dronedeploy.com/ ) is a good fit to how can dB can be made to incorporate way-point flying. Say we can have one more tab - other than the block diagram, mission and we can have a waypoint tab, where we can do drop pin as way points navi onto a google map based on the DJI GPS readings.  

I will be glad to see if how we can co-work for the integration of the waypoint flying. 

By the way, is the save and share feature surfacing soon? That will be really useful to most of us. 

[d...@unmannedairlines.com]

Thanks. We are very familiar with DroneDeploy and several of the other mapping apps. The goal would be to make sure we still introduce waypoints in a "code friendly" way. We've been thinking about a simple "goto waypoint" block that will launch a map view and a user can click on it. From that they would still be able to add different actions such as pitching the gimbal, rotating the aircraft, taking a photo/video. 

Saving and sharing missions should be available for beta later this week. We're still doing some internal testing and will update when ready.

[boon.n...@gmail.com]

Hope this is not too much. 

Say u got the waypoint block, once user click onto it, evoke a window which relates to the drop pin position that u had earlier defined on the rendered map location. U drop 10, u can see 1-10 for example. Each drag and drop block denotes the index of the drop pin. 

One comment on the general operation of the app - is it possible to highlight the flow or at what stage your UAV is at realtime? 

[Preston Ward]

We want to be careful not to 'recreate the wheel' in terms of building something like DroneDeploy or MapsMadeEasy. With this in mind, the dev team will probably start with a very simple & user friendly single waypoint block, and of course users could add multiple waypoint blocks.

Definitely possible to highlight real time the current task as it works through the mission, this is on the feature list for future improvements :)

[d...@unmannedairlines.com]

Thanks for the suggestion. We'll continue to think on the waypoint block.

Regarding highlighting the blocks we had this in a previous test version, but it turns out DJI had a bug in their SDK which wouldn't allow us to highlight blocks things like yaw, take photo, pitch gimbal, start video. But we could highlight blocks such as flying forward, changing altitude. We decided to leave it out of DroneBlocks until DJI fixes the bug. There have been a couple of SDK updates since we last checked so we'll look again soon and see if they've fixed it.

Also, if you're interested you can try saving a few missions in our desktop beta here:

https://dev.droneblocks.io

You login with your Google account. When we release this for iPad all of the missions you save will be available on iPad. Here is one I'm working on that is a full panorama similar to another app that we've developed called DronePan:

https://dev.droneblocks.io?share=1&missionId=-KIQUCoZh87mu0vUBcGz

Please let us know if you come across any bugs!

Thanks.

[boon.n...@gmail.com]

Mates, i had a feel of the save and share mission. 

It is exactly what i had expected, thanks. 

I had not put my M100 for the test of your panorama design block; i will do it when i got the bandwidth again. 

Thanks 

[boon.n...@gmail.com]

On my M100, i did a simple
1)Take off to 25ft
2)Forward to 15ft
3)Hover 10 sec
4)Land

Just after the Hover, i encountered an abrupt pan to the left of approx 8ft just before landing is initiated?

What can be the reason behind the abrupt pan?

[d...@unmannedairlines.com]

This is not intentional and there's a good chance your aircraft may have drifted a bit while hovering. If so, the aircraft will try to reposition itself when landing. We've also seen this on takeoff. DJI tells us that their drift logic will be updated in an upcoming release of the firmware so this should no longer be an issue in the future.