Drone stalling between components in mission
Hello Everyone,
We had an issue today that we haven't come across before. We had a mission combining mapping grids, orbits around the asset and then a video. The drone completed the mapping grids (3 different heights - 13m, 19m and 25m), then stopped at the end of the last grid (25m) and continued to take photos every 2 seconds while hovering... It refused to start the next component (20m orbit around the asset). We returned to home, changed batteries and restarted the mission, and the drone flew directly back to the end of the mapping grid and started taking photos while hovering again. No matter what we tried we couldn't get the drone to end the mapping mission and start the orbit.
In the end we cancelled the mission and completed the orbits using on the fly function, and manually captured the video.
Has anyone else had this happen before? The distance between the end of the mapping mission and the start of the orbit was about 60m...
Cheers,
Comments
11 comments
Can you share the mission please ?
Ive attached the mission link here for you... Ive looked at the parameters as initially I thought I must have stuffed up somewhere, but I can't see any issues between the last mapping grid and the first orbit component...
https://app.dronelink.com/michael-porritt-y9lQ7XeKYhXHpjULZcVg/seqwater/plan/efJOVh1q6jEKdRnEl2Z9/2aoXJUM4RkqX4pHbMaz7
Cheers,
yeah all looks good, what device and drone are you using, what if you split it into 2 missions, first the mapping section, then the orbits and video
https://app.dronelink.com/martin-reading/public-test/plan/0Xm7IDuDbrVjA5LQXiik
https://app.dronelink.com/martin-reading/public-test/plan/E3QG6uh2FiOkwyVfqSSo
Phantom 4 pro v2, and the latest iPad.... We do these missions all the time with the grids then orbits then video. Never a problem up till today. Might have been the drone just having a moment... I have noticed that when doing the grids, every now and then it will fly a bit without taking images then it seems like it remembers and takes a few in a burst before going back to 1 every 2 seconds... Don't know if this is a coms issue with the controller and drone, or if its a known issue with the phantom and DJI... We always get plenty of redundancy in our photos so its not a real issue, just something ive noticed in the past few years...
Do you run the beta version ?
No we run the normal release of the software...
It sounds similar to the issue discussed here. Some time ago we switched the default for maps to use distance instead of time for capturing images. What that means is now, Dronelink issues a camera start capture command when the front overlap distance has elapsed, and it is possible for these commands to “stack up” if the drone is slow to receive them or if the camera is slow to execute them or if the SD card is slow to save the images. The user in the other thread was clearly asking his drone to do something it couldn’t do by using an interval less than 2 seconds, but that isn’t the case here. The fix we are currently implementing for his issue is to just throw away all the queued camera commands if the drone reaches the end of the segment (or entire map as in your case), but of course this means you will have missing data (as you have already pointed out that you see that happen with coms issues). In the meantime, you can switch your maps to using time instead of distance capture priority, which just sets the camera into interval photo mode like normal and then the capture commands won’t be affected as much by latency or anything else (besides SD card speed) because we only issue one start and stop per segment.
Following on from Jim's note. Are you using a fast enough SD card?
You know what, that very well may be the case. I ran out of memory on a mission last week and swapped over memory cards. I did have a Samsung Evo Plus in the drone which has a write speed of 30mb/second, and swapped it out with a sandisk ultra, which apparently only has a 10mb/sec write speed.... I thought they were both the same until your post prompted me to check...
I think this may be the issue after all, might have to invest in a new set of memory cards to ensure that this doesn't happen again and throw out the old ones (or put them in the old GoPros)...
Cheers,
My suggestion is to use a V30 speed rated card. 30MB/s is very slow. Suggest looking into a Sandisk Extreme Pro V30 which is one of their top SD cards. Rated at 200MB/s read speed and 140MB/s write. You will never have any issue and the price difference is minimal compared to other cheaper brands. Sandisk list them at only $20 for a 64gig and $33 for a 128gig. You can find them elsewhere even cheaper and can’t go wrong with them. Buy once and never look back. 🤪. Enjoy.
We will be pushing out a kernel update soon to prevent captures from stacking up on base legs and at the end of maps.
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