Lost control in weird 'joystick' mode

[Richard-mavic]

The other day, whilst trying to do some active track filming, I noticed that the mavic had stopped 'following' it's subject and was just hovering. So I came out of active track to take over manually. I soon discovered that I couldn't control the mavic at all except for little nudges from its hover position, that as soon as I let go of the stick, world result in the mavic reverting to the same position.

At the same time I noticed that the controller was showing "JOYSTICK" and the app was also displaying the same next to the little icon at the top.

I'm guessing I had ended up in a weird flight mode, but I could not get out of this mode at all, and in the end could only think of an RTH to get in to land. To make matters worse it was hovering over water. It was lucky I had set rth in a deliberately sensible place as I was flying from a boat but had chosen to take off from land as a last ditch failsafe (which I had no intention of using).

Can anyone tell me what I had done to get in this mode? And equally what I could have done to regain normal flight control. I'm sure it will be something really obvious, but with 4 years of dji experience I couldn't work it out under pressure.

Thanks.

 

[JLane]

Flicking to Sport mode usually cancels out of any flight modes. Did you try that?

As for the "Joystick" mode, it's a bit of a mystery to me. Others have mentioned seeing it pop up, but I don't believe it's any kind of flight mode that we're able to enter into intentionally.

 

[Richard-mavic]

I did try that. Made no difference

 

[enzo200500]

My controller enters 'joystick mode' when running the Hangar 360 app.
Shutting down the app does not revert to anything.
I just flick into Sport mode and back again to resume normal control.

In joystick, the drone will not respond to any inputs and does exactly the same as yours.
Even altitude cannot be changed!

I was flying at 06:30 this morning and also hovering over water!

 

[Richard-mavic]

It's a hopeless situation if for any reason your rth location is not viable. There must be some documentation for it, as both the controller and so app were showing "joystick".

Hoping someone knows about it...!

 

[BorisTheSpider]

I've seen the joystick mode annunciation on the controller when doing 360 panoramas in Litchi, but I never got stuck in it and didn't try controlling the drone manually while it was active.

 

[Richard-mavic]

I was only using dji go at the time, but it did appear to fail in its tracking. I wouldn't mind if I knew how/why it happened.

 

[Mavicsailor]

The other day, whilst trying to do some active track filming, I noticed that the mavic had stopped 'following' it's subject and was just hovering. So I came out of active track to take over manually. I soon discovered that I couldn't control the mavic at all except for little nudges from its hover position, that as soon as I let go of the stick, world result in the mavic reverting to the same position.

At the same time I noticed that the controller was showing "JOYSTICK" and the app was also displaying the same next to the little icon at the top.

I'm guessing I had ended up in a weird flight mode, but I could not get out of this mode at all, and in the end could only think of an RTH to get in to land. To make matters worse it was hovering over water. It was lucky I had set rth in a deliberately sensible place as I was flying from a boat but had chosen to take off from land as a last ditch failsafe (which I had no intention of using).

Can anyone tell me what I had done to get in this mode? And equally what I could have done to regain normal flight control. I'm sure it will be something really obvious, but with 4 years of dji experience I couldn't work it out under pressure.

Thanks.

I saw this while using Hangar360. I assumed it was because the app basically had control of my joy sticks, and I did not. After I flipped into sport mode the app asked if I wanted control, and after confirming yes, I again could control the AC with the sticks.

The folks at Hangar are very responsive. I had a question and they answered immediately. Maybe give them a call if questions or problems concerning this message. You won't get the same responsiveness from DJI on the message in Active Track, but I assume the message and cause/effect are the same.

 

[Richard-mavic]

Ok so this is looking a lot like a bug. I'm using the latest app and firmware from a week or so ago.

I appreciate the help with the references to hangar/litchi, but in fairness it is not their apps that caused the unusual behaviour so I can't really bring it to them.

After it got into this mode, I tried:

- Flicking between p & S and back
- pressing pause
- c1/2 buttons
- killing and restarting the app

But nothing made any difference.
After I started the rth I did manage to control it a little on the decent. I couldn't ascertain whether it was fixed. I also took off again as normal straight away after landing, without rebooting anything in-between.

How/where can this be investigated further by dji? Will they even bother looking into it?

 

[btye1]

I had this same exact problem yesterday while flying my Mavic at the lake. I was on a boat in activetrack mode and unfortunately the boat was going too fast for the mavic to keep up, so I switched to sport mode to catch up the drone to the boat and then the DJI Go app disconnected (which seems to be happening alot lately) and my controller just showed this "Joystick" mode, when I finally got the app to reconnect back to the mavic, joystick movement would just barely move the drone, less than 5 degrees I would guess, We had to take the boat back towards the mavic and it finally started responding again. I was afraid I had lost my Mavic for good for a few minutes.

 

[Jenee]

I think Joystick mode is related to using any of the intelligent flight modes. I have looked back through my Airdata logs and whenever I have been in one of the intelligent flight modes I also see Joystick mode. This has been there for the previous 3 or 4 firmware updates.

 

[Richard-mavic]

very weird that this has happened in two identical scenarios relating to boats. Can it be a bug related specifically to tracking boats?! i know that the boat icon appeared on my screen when i selected the boat.

Can anyone help me with what the formal process would be for getting this reported as a bug?

thanks, Richard

 

[dbehr]

I had the same issue of using a DronePan App (IOS), and it actually failed, so I exit it and resumed to DJI GO 4, but had the JOYSTICK on the controller and on the main DJI GO App window. Couldn't control the Mavic. Only by RTH and then aborting it, I regained stick control. All was over land. Very strange. They use DJI'S SDK 3.5.

 

[Richard-mavic]

I had the same issue of using a DronePan App (IOS), and it actually failed, so I exit it and resumed to DJI GO 4, but had the JOYSTICK on the controller and on the main DJI GO App window. Couldn't control the Mavic. Only by RTH and then aborting it, I regained stick control. All was over land. Very strange. They use DJI'S SDK 3.5.

ah well good to know that a cancelled RTH will fix the problem. I did the RTH but didn't try regaining control. You can cancel via the app, right?

 

[Mikenizm]

I also had the same issue when in active track following a boat. In the beginning the Mavic followed the boat just fine but at some point the Mavic was going slower and slower and eventually just hovered and the boat got out of reach. At that point i couldn't control the Mavic anymore and my screen showed Joystick mode. I also tried switching to sports mode and back but that didn't work so I used RTH and that did work. When the Mavic was descending to the landing point i cancelled RTH and got my control of the Mavic back. So i guess going into RTH en cancelling it should work to get the controls back

Here is te log file of that flight, the Joystick mode happened at 05m 16s.
Airdata UAV - Flight Data Analysis for Drones

 

[hilbrink]

ah well good to know that a cancelled RTH will fix the problem. I did the RTH but didn't try regaining control. You can cancel via the app, right?

I can confirm this worked ... well at least for me. I must admit I was pretty scared (the Magic was hovering 20m up, 50 out over a lake ...)

 

[Roo]

I think I read somewhere or saw in an instructional video that joystick mode is displayed when an application has taken over or changed some or all of normal stick functionality. Here's an example screenshot from the Litchi manual under "Focus mode".

 

[BumblerBee]

I got this mysterious "Joystick" mode today. I was trying DronePan app (DronePan on the App Store) and decided to be in a safe spot with only 4m of altitude. Started the batch program in the app. I however was taking pictures of the same spot, instead of rotating and taking several rows. I tried rotating using RC, which worked, but seems to have thrown the app off, as it said that panorama failed and stopped recording.

After that I did not get the control of the AC back. It was displaying "Joystick" on the RC. I shut off the app and launched DJI Go. It still remained in the "Joystick" mode (have DJI Go log to show for it).

Others noted that "rotating" left/right with the stick only gave a few degrees of yaw - that was from the gimbal control. The drone was not responding to any inputs. In the end I hit RTH to bring it down. According to the log, it cancelled "Joystick" and enabled the "Landing" made.

Looks like DronePan is not the route to go. Will try DJI Go's recent 180 panorama addition later...
PS: That was for Spark, and not for Mavic.

 

[Blade]

just happened to me today herein Hawaii! Thank god I was not over water but VERY close to it and over a sharp lava field. I was also using the active track mode that always has trouble to follow me. This time it also lost me and then I wanted to redo it and realized that the drone didn't react to any stick movements and same problem with Joystick on RC display. I tried also the STOP/Brake button on the RC but nothing helped. Rebooted the DJI app, still the same. RTH I didn't try as this was a sharp lava field and I was worried that it would not land nice.
I then turned the RC OFF, the drone started the RTH sequence, while I turned the RC on again and after about 10seconds I was reconnected and everything worked again.
My Samsung S5 is very slow and has lots of problems. I thought it's because of that. But it seems that the RC might have a problem?

 

[ballmatic]

Had the exact same problem happen today! I didn't know the "Sport" mode trick. I tried pausing, selecting another mode, nothing worked. The only thing that saved me was selecting Normal mode over and over until it finally responded. I was very very close to dead so it was scary. I was also using a Spark, not Mavic.