Aero J's trials, tribulations and victories with the Mini4Pro

[AeroJ]

Hey everyone.

Thought I'd do a thread here documenting my experience with the Mini 4 Pro,

I had been flying DJI since the early flamewheel days, then after some unexplained IMU error-related flyaways over 5 years, some trust had been lost, so had since defected to Yuneec briefly for a couple of years (Typhoon H+), and then after a big break in the hobby for me, I am back, encouraged by the relatively sensible rules for sub-250g flyers and the immense camera DJI gives us in such a tiny frame ! I am worried about its resistance to our typical levels of wind, but hey ho, let's give it a go, and see how far we get !

So here we are on Day 1 !

We got off to a rocky start. DHL were delivering my Mini and a ton of accessories, and left it on the doorstep of some random house over 500 ft away from my own, and then falsified records about receiving a signature from me ! Fortunately, I was relatively on it, and one short(ish) detective hunt later, and I have my boxes ! DJI were very nice about it, gave me a small store credit and, despite DHLs disgraceful behaviour, had got me my UAV 2 days early !

And so the adventure begins...

Because DJI got me stuff 2 days earlier than expected my 30 watt USB charger isn't getting here til Friday. Any chance I can use a standard phone one in the meantime to get up and running with the flymore charge box ?

Thanks guys - nice to have somewhere to hang out and discuss the flyings !

 

[tstr14]

You don't have to have a 35 watt charger to charge the batteries. Lower wattage will charger them, just at slower rate.

 

[AeroJ]

You don't have to have a 35 watt charger to charge the batteries. Lower wattage will charger them, just at slower rate.

Thank you, yes, that was fine. 10 Watt standard charger from local supermarket. Took 2 hrs to do one battery, but I'll take it !

 

[AeroJ]

Anybody know why they would turn off the nav lights whenever we are recording video, and if there is anyway to stop that behaviour, which seems insane to me, especially at night, when it's the only chance for VLOS with the craft ? I can sort of see why they might lose the front ones in case they affect the camera, but I can't think of single reason on earth why the rear ones have to go off too. Even when this happens in the day its a disaster because it reduces VLOS to about 50 ft under horizon level !

 

[Droning on and on...]

They turn them off, especially for night, so you don't see them pulsing in the video.

No, there's no way to re-enable them other than to stop filming, but believe me, there's no point in shooting video at night with them on.

 

[MARK (LI)]

You really need something more than those nav lights at night to be within the regs here in the US

 

[cameracamel]

Hey everyone.

Thought I'd do a thread here documenting my experience with the Mini 4 Pro,

I had been flying DJI since the early flamewheel days, then after some unexplained IMU error-related flyaways over 5 years, some trust had been lost, so had since defected to Yuneec briefly for a couple of years (Typhoon H+), and then after a big break in the hobby for me, I am back, encouraged by the relatively sensible rules for sub-250g flyers and the immense camera DJI gives us in such a tiny frame ! I am worried about its resistance to our typical levels of wind, but hey ho, let's give it a go, and see how far we get !

So here we are on Day 1 !

We got off to a rocky start. DHL were delivering my Mini and a ton of accessories, and left it on the doorstep of some random house over 500 ft away from my own, and then falsified records about receiving a signature from me ! Fortunately, I was relatively on it, and one short(ish) detective hunt later, and I have my boxes ! DJI were very nice about it, gave me a small store credit and, despite DHLs disgraceful behaviour, had got me my UAV 2 days early !

And so the adventure begins...

Because DJI got me stuff 2 days earlier than expected my 30 watt USB charger isn't getting here til Friday. Any chance I can use a standard phone one in the meantime to get up and running with the flymore charge box ?

Thanks guys - nice to have somewhere to hang out and discuss the flyings !

Yuneec !! Funny....I pulled out my Yuneec Typhoon 4K about a week ago... Still runs fine....Need to register my Holy Stone RID module so I can fly the 4k again !!!!

 

[AeroJ]

Yuneec !! Funny....I pulled out my Yuneec Typhoon 4K about a week ago... Still runs fine....Need to register my Holy Stone RID module so I can fly the 4k again !!!!

I will always have a fondness for that Typhoon H, and find myself somewhat loathed to sell it - it occupies a 'yuneec' space in the history of UAVs, with its retractable landing gear, and I never tired of its awesome traveling spin shots facilitated by it's auto-rotating gimbal, which was utterly independent of craft movement. And it could fight wind like no drone I had seen before.

Of course it had bad points too - I hated the way it jerked into motion once you left stationary hover, and the UK's pathetically weak transmitter power limits meaning it was always disconnecting from the camera, coupled with the fact was the driftiest MOFO ever when it lost GPS, which it did fairly often, led me to look for a smaller, less worrisome replacement.

Unfortunately, the H's are almost impossible to get battery packs for by now, and all 4 of mine are now in rather suspect states of old age and trustworthiness, and the CGO+ camera was latterly producing unsolvably flickery footage, hence its pre-crash retirement..

 

[AeroJ]

Anybody ever had a thing where they have the M4P powered up on a table next to them, and them, and it's all sitting there nicely, and then you pan the camera 90 degrees down and get the 'Calibrate gimbal' message ? This message persists until I raise the cam again, and it disappears until I drop it down to minimum again. It ONLY does this on the bench next to me and never out in the field or in the air. And it also behaves absolutely perfectly, and is level as it should be. Anyone got any idea why I might be getting the calibrate message just in that one indoor location ?

 

[AeroJ]

All the fun this evening, which was day 4 of the flyings, and pleased to say I have got my first crash out of the way embarassingly early Got a calibrate IMU message just before take-off, but blamed this on all the time it had been sitting there on, heating up, so powered down and let it cool off a while. Sure enough, when next fired up, no message, so thought I'd try a take-off and keep to 2 ft above the ground until I was sure it was fine.

Well good job, because it wasn't fine, and as soon as we started moving and yawing, the craft began a slow arc into the ground I tried to, but could not counter. It fell into long bouncy grass, and it's own lack of weight saved it any damage at all, thank goodness. Gimbal seemed a bit upset, but was not loose.

Powered down, reset, calibrated the IMU, all fine after that for rest of session. So, with that noob-twattery out of the way, and having fluked my way out of a no-punishment mistake, we move onwards and upwards with equal amounts of XP and shame points added to the graph...

 

[AeroJ]

Just had an opportunity to actually weigh my M4P, you know, just to check. 248g AUW including the compliance and address stickers on it. Noting here so I remember what the actual weight is. Need to do it again when my reflective 'visibility strips' get here to make sure they don't push it over.

 

[AeroJ]

Cruise Control is properly blowing my mind at the moment So far that has been the most practically useful feature of the M4P. I particularly love that you can input, say, a forward movement and cruise that, then later add rotation and just update it to keep it doing both, so you can stack moves progressively without ever getting rubbish transitions from wonky human inputs.