Since I did a bunch of research and didn’t find anyone who had done this - I just successfully flew a multi-battery flight using a programmed route in DJI Pilot and the Smart Controller. Here’s the steps:
1) Fire up the DJI Pilot app and your drone and plug in your route. I wasn’t thrilled that moving it turned it into a polygon flight, but that’s fine. Also note - you need internet access for it to download the maps. I tethered it to my phone since I was in the field.
2) Start flying the route. In this case my route was about 85 minutes of flying.
3) Monitor the battery. I tended to wait until the 25% mark or so, but that depended on whether it was coming back or heading out.
4) Hit the pause button in the app. It should/may tell you it was successful.
5) I then clicked RTH on my controller and it came home. I shut off the drone, swapped the batteries, then turned it on
6) once the controller reconnects, the Play button will light up on the screen. It will confirm you want to resume from the waypoint, and then confirm the flight. It’ll then head off and pick up mapping again.
I ran through 4 batteries this way (about 1400 pictures total) and it worked like a charm. Not a bad idea to swap out memory cards when you swap batteries so if something happens you don’t lose all your work.
I know there’s several apps out there for this, but I wanted to explicitly use the Smart Controller and it seemed to work like a charm!
I was using a Mavic 2 Pro Enterprise Dual if anyone was wondering.
1) Fire up the DJI Pilot app and your drone and plug in your route. I wasn’t thrilled that moving it turned it into a polygon flight, but that’s fine. Also note - you need internet access for it to download the maps. I tethered it to my phone since I was in the field.
2) Start flying the route. In this case my route was about 85 minutes of flying.
3) Monitor the battery. I tended to wait until the 25% mark or so, but that depended on whether it was coming back or heading out.
4) Hit the pause button in the app. It should/may tell you it was successful.
5) I then clicked RTH on my controller and it came home. I shut off the drone, swapped the batteries, then turned it on
6) once the controller reconnects, the Play button will light up on the screen. It will confirm you want to resume from the waypoint, and then confirm the flight. It’ll then head off and pick up mapping again.
I ran through 4 batteries this way (about 1400 pictures total) and it worked like a charm. Not a bad idea to swap out memory cards when you swap batteries so if something happens you don’t lose all your work.
I know there’s several apps out there for this, but I wanted to explicitly use the Smart Controller and it seemed to work like a charm!
I was using a Mavic 2 Pro Enterprise Dual if anyone was wondering.
