Newbie needing help if possible please.

warpfactor55 · Feb 19, 2018

Apologies for what will be obvious to most of you but this newbie would like to establish some core principles of flying a drone please, probably a DJI Mavic. I intend to buy a Mavic for a project but would like to clear up some queries first. The only experience that I have of drone flying is when my Son flew his over the farm which is sort of what my project is about. I also have to state that my mobile ‘phone is steam driven (Nokia N8) and so will not be linked to the controller. I am currently thinking of a mini i-pad for this and I believe that it has to be a mini-iPad2 or above. Is that correct ? I am reasonably pc literate and will be able to link the i-Pad to my router and presume that is how I am able to acquire any downloads pertinent to the Mavic ?

Am I also correct in thinking that the drone can be controlled either by Wi-Fi or by radio control ? I’m not actually sure what the difference is but because my proposed i-Pad viewer will obviously not be connected to any cellular network I assume that it will have to be RC. Is all that correct ? What are advantages/disadvantages of Wi-Fi vs RC anyway please ?

Can the video taken be stored on my proposed i-Pad AND also on the SD card at the same time ? I have noticed that the video format can be MP4 as well as other formats but is that the best option for quality ?

I would appreciate it very much if anyone is able to answer some/all of those queries for a start but I am sure that there are more in the pipeline. I am in the process of reading the Mavic manual from a link kindly sent to me by a respondent to my Pilot Check In topic. Hello from England. Thanks to anyone prepared to assist.

galfridus · Feb 19, 2018

Mavics can be controlled by your phone/iPad directly via a WiFi connection to the drone. Range is poor in this scenario plus you have to use onscreen joysticks.

Alternately you can plug your device into the RC (a wired connection) so the RC connects to the drone (also on WiFi frequencies). In this mode your device needs no connectivity of any sort. You can update the RC and Mavic firmware in this way (you can also connect the Mavic directly to a PC and use DJI Assistant, a program which runs on Mac / Windows).

You can download video to the iPad as it flies but the quality is lower, only the SD card gets full resolution.

Hope this helps and that it's all correct.

warpfactor55 · Feb 19, 2018

Thank you @galfridus. So let's just see if I've got that bit right. If I use an iPad linked to the Mavic controller via a cable I then control the drone with the controller using WiFi and the iPad is showing me what the camera sees + information that I need to know about the drone, i.e. height, battery, distance, etc. etc.. I understand about storing the video on the SD card because I wouldn't want anything other than good quality video.