Has anyone tried using an MA2 for mapping (flying manually at this point)? if so how did it work?

[Jordaneer]

Has anyone used an MA2 and tried doing mapping with it? I'm debating weather its worth it to try it, or if I should stick with my current mavic at this time that is compatible with map planning apps like pix4dcapture and dronedeploy

 

[NLOL]

I'm new to this. How could/would you do this given the present lack of waypoint navigation presently available for the MA2?

 

[Meta4]

Has anyone used an MA2 and tried doing mapping with it? I'm debating weather its worth it to try it, or if I should stick with my current mavic at this time that is compatible with map planning apps like pix4dcapture and dronedeploy

DJI have not released the SDk for the Air 2 so none of the mapping app developers are able to update their software to work with the Air 2.
No-one has been using it for mapping.

 

[Keule]

Has anyone used an MA2 and tried doing mapping with it?

I have done a test flight with the MA2 and tried to map an area with a celltower for 3D reconstruction
I flew in T-mode and had the capture interval set to 2 seconds.
The flightpath was an approximate double grid and 2 oblique shots around the tower.

All the flights had to be done manually, so i tried to guess the sidelap and frontlap.
Also a problem is the missing POI mode in which you fly around a POI and shoot images in an interval. (You only can circle around some point and a video is taken)
That leads to an output with too many images (707) Anyhow, I uploaded the images to PIX4D and received a usable 3D mesh.

Before uploading the images to PIX4D, i recognized that DJI had again some strange altitude references in the EXIF / XMPpart of all images. DJI simply did this: (I was taking off at 515m MSL)


So i had to correct the false / incomplete data with exiftool.

Currently i am processing another dataset from a MA2 with Metashape - Have to wait for another day until the processing is complete ...



All together, in its current state and using the MA2 for mapping, i can not recommend it. Too cumbersome, and a few quirks to work with in a commercial environment.

I liked the long flight time with one battery, you can really cover some area.
If at some point in this year DJI will release the SDK (or even GSPro) and 3rd party apps make use of it, then go for it.

 

[Jordaneer]

I'm new to this. How could/would you do this given the present lack of waypoint navigation presently available for the MA2?

Do it manually, I set up a flight with my Mavic air in dronedeploy then tried to approximate it with my MA2, Frankly it was a PITA. I'm going to try again in a couple days now that I have my RTK GPS

 

[KelvinFPV]

Pix4dreact says camera not supported when I tried.

 

[Keule]

Pix4dreact says camera not supported when I tried.

You need to install a user-defined camera parameter file.

How to generate an XML file to process an unsupported camera in PIX4Dreact

IN THIS ARTICLE User-provided camera parameter fileHow to use the camera parameter fileHow to obtain the camera parameter file Camera parameter template Camera parameter file export from PI...

support.pix4d.com