virtual mission with Litchi- 2 questions

[bburnett15]

I've finally figured out how to make the Virtual Mission work on my computer, now I am wondering about:
a) the different camera views that are available. do you find them to be fairly accurate?
and
b) the video I am getting is very jerky. any recommendations for making the video smoother?
TIA

 

[JoelP]

The virtual missions are pretty accurate but be careful about the tops of trees. I generated a Litchi waypoint mission and flew it 3 years ago then mistakenly flew the same mission again last Spring and hit the top of an evergreen tree. Fortunately it wasn’t so resilient of a tree top so my drone flew on, but it was a good lesson for me.

 

[Dave Maine]

3 issues to note.

1. Litchi’s ground altitude reference is always the ground altitude that the drone takes off from, and must match the launch point used in creating the virtual route.

2. In all cases, the drone‘s barometric altimeter is used while flying, and is not particularly accurate and repeatable.

3. Using a ground referenced altitude starting point does not take into account trees, buildings etc. You will need to work that out from surveying the site. Google Earth will not be reliable for this, as trees grow, new buildings are added etc.

 

[AZDave]

The jerkiness is possibly due to the virtual stick control. It makes turns in steps instead of smoothly. Using multiple smaller turns (i.e., more waypoints) instead one large one can help.

In addition to the other solid comments here, I'd like to mention that making changes to a route can have unexpected consequences. I had a path in Maven, a similar application to Litchi, all laid out and proven by a test run with the drone. I decided to smooth out one of the turns, with the result that it shifted the path sideways enough to send it toward a tree. Luckily I was closely monitoring the flight on the controller screen and stopped it before it crashed.