Is there a way to Program Litchi to Retrace an Existing Manual Flight?

Grantt · May 23, 2019

Lets say I've manually flown around an area using normal DJIGo4. Is there a way that I can program the drone to automatically refly that exact same path at a later date? Hoping there is a built in magic feature to do this.

But if there is no magic feature, I know that I can go back into the flight logs and see exactly where the drone flew. Meaning that the flight log must contain a detailed list of Lat/long coordinates and altitude. Not sure if it also contains pitch and yaw data. So I wonder if I can take these coordinates and transfer it into a Litchi mission containing thousands of waypoints based on that flight log. That should accomplish the task I'm thinking about. Launch the mission and it will retrace the original flight. The waypoints would contain xyz coordinates, camera pitch and yaw. That sounds like a reasonable task that could somehow be automated. I suppose mimicking the exact speed of the drone could be problematic, but that's ok, I'm thinking it doesn't have to arrive at every waypoint at the exact same time as the original mission.

Any thoughts on this?

sar104 · May 23, 2019

You certainly could construct a Litchi mission from the flight data, but bear in mind that Litchi is limited to 99 waypoints, and so you would have to downsample the flight track data. That can be automated.

Grantt · May 24, 2019

Oh. I didn't know litchi had a 99 point max. That might be an issue. Thanks for the input.

Racin8de · May 24, 2019

Pretty sure you have want have to use Litchi, create a mission and save it.. Then in the future after you have flown that mission, you can repeat the exact flight path because it will have been saved.... I have a bunch of mine saved....

Grantt · May 25, 2019

Racin8de said:
Pretty sure you have want have to use Litchi, create a mission and save it.. Then in the future after you have flown that mission, you can repeat the exact flight path because it will have been saved.... I have a bunch of mine saved....

Yes. We normally manually enter a Litchi mission waypoint by waypoint, then save it, and fly it, and fly it again in the future as many times we want. I'm looking for a way for instead of "manually" entering the waypoints, have some routine that will automatically enter those waypoints into Litchi based on a previously flown "joystick controlled" flight.

AMann · May 25, 2019

Grantt said:
Yes. We normally manually enter a Litchi mission waypoint by waypoint, then save it, and fly it, and fly it again in the future as many times we want. I'm looking for a way for instead of "manually" entering the waypoints, have some routine that will automatically enter those waypoints into Litchi based on a previously flown "joystick controlled" flight.

Do you take photos as you are doing it? There are ways to extract waypoints from photos as a CSV and KML files too, then you could enter that into Litchi. I use ExifTools to make KML’s for GoogleEarth and waypoints on my GPS, it could easily be used to create the same for Litchi: