Litchi Waypoint in windy conditions

Pablo · May 16, 2017

i was flying a Litchi waypoint mission the other day. On the way back my Mavic was struggling in the wind. I was only able to do about 4mph. If I'd let the mission continue I wouldn't have got the Mavic home again.

Instead I cancelled the mission and put it into Sport mode and it cut through the wind no problem.

What else could I have done in this situation? Can you flip into Sport mode mid-waypoint mission?

If not I think it's a concern. Say you lost connection in windy conditions litchi wouldn't be smart enough to switch to sport mode and your beloved drone would never make it back. Is this correct?

darana · May 18, 2017

My couple experiences with Litchi so far have been abysmal with even a hint of wind.

I can fly with DJI Go 4 with pretty silly wind levels and hardly notice it. I went to a safe location to test and according to AirData logs I got hit with a 30mph gust w/ ~22mph sustained winds - yeah it was slower going upwind. Autopilot has been quite good in winds, too, though I've unfortunately gotten to use it less b/c my iPad Air gen 1 doesn't have enough ram to run it stably. The one issue was the aforementioned day w/ 18-22mph sustained winds - Autopilot actually started going backwards.

adiru · May 20, 2017

Pablo said:
i was flying a Litchi waypoint mission the other day. On the way back my Mavic was struggling in the wind. I was only able to do about 4mph. If I'd let the mission continue I wouldn't have got the Mavic home again.

Instead I cancelled the mission and put it into Sport mode and it cut through the wind no problem.

What else could I have done in this situation? Can you flip into Sport mode mid-waypoint mission?

If not I think it's a concern. Say you lost connection in windy conditions litchi wouldn't be smart enough to switch to sport mode and your beloved drone would never make it back. Is this correct?

Make sure you set cruise speed and max speed to 33 mph
and then when you load the mission in litchi, in settings make sure max speed is set to 33mph

then when mission starts, immediately manually push to max speed on the stick
because point of rc signal lost, whatever speed it was going at the time, will be litchi's max speed for the duration of blackout.
so, best to fly downwind on the outbound when doing long distance litchi, but calculate to make sure you have sufficent fuel to get back
and set critical battery level to 10%
Hopefully you are on firmware 400 or lower, because anything newer sets it to 16%,and if you hit a NFZ limit while lost signal on litchi waypoint and low batt, say good bye to your mavic

Logger · May 20, 2017

Pablo said:
i was flying a Litchi waypoint mission the other day. On the way back my Mavic was struggling in the wind. I was only able to do about 4mph. If I'd let the mission continue I wouldn't have got the Mavic home again.

Instead I cancelled the mission and put it into Sport mode and it cut through the wind no problem.

What else could I have done in this situation? Can you flip into Sport mode mid-waypoint mission?

a) If you had the max speed slider set at the max of 33mph you could have pushed full forward elevator and it would have attempted to accelerate towards this speed. The Max speed setting in Littchi WPT being the speed it lets you temporarily override WPT mission speed to. I alway leave this at the maximum for this reason.

b) Cancelling the mission as you did and flying home in Sports mode

c) Cancelling the mission and hitting RTH.

Pablo · May 22, 2017

Thanks @adiru and @Logger . I will make sure I set the max speed to 33 mph in future.

I suppose the same thing applies to the DJI Go 4 app in general, not just Litchi. That is: if you are flying in normal mode and lose signal, and the Mavic struggles against the wind is it smart enough to switch to Sport mode to ensure it makes it back to the Home Point?