I received my second Mavic the other day (the first one had a blurry right side. This one has focal issues too, but that's another story). Took her out for the maiden flight yesterday and quickly had my bubbly mood crushed by yet more issues with DJI GO 4.
Aside from the obvious contention between Google and China, I cannot understand why they would switch from a well known, well supported, known-to-work solution of Google Maps, to Here Maps, which has proven to be sporadically unreliable, and overall lower quality than Gmaps. And I also don't understand why they would stick with it, when it has caused so many issues and concerns and, in some cases, flyaways and warranty claims (it's how I lost my P3P, but since RTH was initiated due to signal loss, the home point jump didn't show in the flight log. I had a screen shot showing my "controller" location a quarter mile from where I actually was, but apparently that wasn't proof enough).
In the end I did fly, but extremely conservatively because I had absolutely no confidence in any automated systems if something should go wrong. Below are 3 screenshots. The first two are from DJI GO 4, and show the correct home point and aircraft location (where I actually was), but a severely incorrect controller/pilot location. It's not even the same wrong location! This was literally less than 30 seconds apart... I could close down DJI GO 4, open it back up, and have a totally different (but still wrong) location. The most prevalent one was the middle of the river though. The only way I could find to try and "update" my position in DJI GO 4 was to try and set the homepoint to my location, and every time it would say something like "weak signal, cannot acquire location". Which is total BS, because I could instantly switch over to google maps and have my location down to a couple feet. Switch back to DJI GO 4? Nope, I'm in a river. Reboot the phone and try again? River.
![Screenshot_20170427-170449[1].png](https://mavicpilots.com/data/attachments/11/11773-261aef4a0f48abc9ac5311441f4cfbd3.jpg "Screenshot_20170427-170449[1].png")
![Screenshot_20170427-172453[1].png](https://mavicpilots.com/data/attachments/11/11774-5ea2b8c5de56f8dfdf16f7ea2c766f46.jpg "Screenshot_20170427-172453[1].png")
![Screenshot_20170427-170849[1].png](https://mavicpilots.com/data/attachments/11/11775-ec73e149fe3e86aee3acd7403c1ebf14.jpg "Screenshot_20170427-170849[1].png")
Granted, this is only the "first half" of the old bug from January (where the controller location would jump, and then upon RTH initiating, it would return to the new controller location), but I wasn't about to find out if the Mavic would go land itself in the river.
All that being said, I had a pretty unsatisfactory flight, feeling like I had to fly my $1000 Mavic like a $50 Syma so I wouldn't have to worry about potentially losing it due to faulty software. On top of the location issue this time, I had the usual several-app-crashes-during-single-flight problem. This is not the kind of quality we should expect from a device this expensive. But I guess that's what happens when there is no legitimate competition on the market.
I'm probably going to end up trying Litchi this weekend. And once I move next month and no longer live within a no fly zone, I'm just going to start developing my own app (driving out of town to fly already sucks. Driving out of town every time I need to test something would suck worse).
Aside from the obvious contention between Google and China, I cannot understand why they would switch from a well known, well supported, known-to-work solution of Google Maps, to Here Maps, which has proven to be sporadically unreliable, and overall lower quality than Gmaps. And I also don't understand why they would stick with it, when it has caused so many issues and concerns and, in some cases, flyaways and warranty claims (it's how I lost my P3P, but since RTH was initiated due to signal loss, the home point jump didn't show in the flight log. I had a screen shot showing my "controller" location a quarter mile from where I actually was, but apparently that wasn't proof enough).
In the end I did fly, but extremely conservatively because I had absolutely no confidence in any automated systems if something should go wrong. Below are 3 screenshots. The first two are from DJI GO 4, and show the correct home point and aircraft location (where I actually was), but a severely incorrect controller/pilot location. It's not even the same wrong location! This was literally less than 30 seconds apart... I could close down DJI GO 4, open it back up, and have a totally different (but still wrong) location. The most prevalent one was the middle of the river though. The only way I could find to try and "update" my position in DJI GO 4 was to try and set the homepoint to my location, and every time it would say something like "weak signal, cannot acquire location". Which is total BS, because I could instantly switch over to google maps and have my location down to a couple feet. Switch back to DJI GO 4? Nope, I'm in a river. Reboot the phone and try again? River.
Granted, this is only the "first half" of the old bug from January (where the controller location would jump, and then upon RTH initiating, it would return to the new controller location), but I wasn't about to find out if the Mavic would go land itself in the river.
All that being said, I had a pretty unsatisfactory flight, feeling like I had to fly my $1000 Mavic like a $50 Syma so I wouldn't have to worry about potentially losing it due to faulty software. On top of the location issue this time, I had the usual several-app-crashes-during-single-flight problem. This is not the kind of quality we should expect from a device this expensive. But I guess that's what happens when there is no legitimate competition on the market.
I'm probably going to end up trying Litchi this weekend. And once I move next month and no longer live within a no fly zone, I'm just going to start developing my own app (driving out of town to fly already sucks. Driving out of town every time I need to test something would suck worse).
