Waypoints, Litchi and Jerky Footage
I upgraded, aircraft, remote a 5 batteries without issue and had no flight problems with the new firmware. I flew a couple of 6 waypoint missions with single a POI which worked without issue.
First of all credit to DJI for adding back waypoints and improving on the original feature set with the MP1 The interface itself is easy to understand and use but does have a few issues.
Firstly, you can’t set the height of waypoints above 65 feed unless you have the aircraft turned on. This effectively means you need to have the Mavic running down its battery and getting hot all the time you are designing your mission. This is not ideal as a complex mission with multiple POIs may take quite a while to set up.
The interface is very fiddly to use – even on my 9.4” iPad. It would be even worse on a iPad mini or a 5” phone or
crystal sky. The map in satellite image mode will not allow you to zoom in far enough to select/move waypoints that are close together. I had a POI I wanted to move and every time I tried to click on the POI it either added another waypoint (which I then couldn’t delete) or added another POI. I ended up with 14 POIs and had to resort to deleting everything and reloading. In map mode you can zoom in slightly more but not much.
It’s great you can save your work too, but unfortunately you can’t give it a name – so locating which mission to load later will rely on remembering when you saved or how many waypoints.
So, just for comparison and designed the same mission in Litchi, standing in the same location with my hands now much colder. What a difference!!
It really is night and day. The Litchi map zooms in much tighter and I had no problem selecting individual points, moving or deleting them or configuring their individual properties. Not once did I add an unwanted point or select the wrong point to edit. The projected path (including the smooth turns) was clearly displayed and the whole experience was a joy to use. (the Go4 had been very frustrating!). I cannot stress enough how much better the interface is (and many more options too) – and of course you don’t need the aircraft or controller on so I could have sat in my car doing it too.
However…… and here’s the real kicker….
NEITHER OF THE PROGRAMS PRODUCED USABLE FOOTAGE!!
In both cases, although the aircraft flew perfectly the left-right panning of the camera while following the POI was incredibly jerky – like someone’s first attempt at flying! Completely unusable even when I flew the missions a second time much slower. Both Litchi and DJI were the same – which tends to support Litchis claim that it’s a problem with the DJI API controller. L
If the rain keeps off I will try another test with AutiPilot which doesn’t use the DJI controller but does require a degree in astrophysics to understand!
At the moment I’m very disappointed.
