Use of native app when there is no internet connection
Hi All,
Yesterday I dropped into a situation that on the area I wanted to fly there were millions of hikers. Of course everybody with mobile phones. Result: almost impossible get internet connection. I spent hours trying o download my missions. I had 7 of them. During the main time I got an idea: it would be great to add to the Dronelink possibilities to allow the users to copy the relevant part of user repositories to the mobile device at those places where the internet connection is fine and allow in the native app to load the missions from those "offline" repos too!
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9 comments
That’s a great idea. Would be so very useful
You can already download for offline:
https://support.dronelink.com/hc/en-us/articles/360052251234-Can-I-use-Dronelink-while-offline-
Hello Jim,
I tried to download a mission as it is described in your post, but I could not find how to activate the "offline" mission in the native application. Could you show us an example? It is possible that only I could not find this function in the native application. On the other hand when I am going somewhere to make a video I always have several prepared plans. Can I download with the current native application several plans and can I execute them?
I checked also your roadmap, but I did not find that kind of task on it. On the other hand I received an e-mail from Dronelink today with the subject: "What two features do you want the most". There was a selectable choice "Offline / native app mission planning". I think my suggestion is very parallel with this subject. I would say it could be the easiest part to realize it, but it could be very useful for the full Dronelink society right now.
In our country the the mobile coverage is 99,9%. I can experience problem only if in a small place the crowd is appearing and the telecom headends are not able to manage the huge number of requests. In some countries (like New Zealand) if you are 1 km out of any inhabited area there is no telecom coverage ===> no internet. I do not know how there the guys are able to manage download missions. If you could solve the problem - offline planing, sincronize the offline and online databases, load plan from offline databases, manage offline maps (as Google maps is doing) - I think you would be the No.1. drone management software owners who is offering this and it would open huge market for you!
Anyway I am waiting your kind answer !
Gábor
Once you download a plan for offline, you just tap Load Plan like any other time and it opens it in the flight dashboard.
The offline / native app mission planning feature on the roadmap survey is talking about a much more comprehensive feature set which would include a full mission planner that could be used offline, in combination with a cached maps. Unfortunately, adding these features is actually very hard and time consuming.
Regarding this subject I have some questions:
1. How many offline plans can I download?
2. If I modified the online plan and on my mobile device an older version is downloaded from which plan the native app will generate the mission?
3. Can I download offline plan several times? With other words: will the offline download overwrite the previous version?
4. How can I clear the offline downloads?
Sorry for those questions, but I could not find any relevant post or video about it. Probably the best would be to create a new video about this subject!
Thank you Jim for the detailed answer! It totally changes my approach how to use Dronelink native application. When in the future I will go for create a new video somewhere I will download my plans for offline use at home. In that case I will be totally independent from the local mobile phone providers. :) It is a very useful feature!
Just one more idea: it would be great to see in the WEB app whether the actual version of a plan is or not downloaded for offline use!
When we have downloaded the offline map/mission the problem would than be during takeoff as in all likely hood we have to change the take off location can this be done in the native app.
You can't change it without a network connection. The only options are to plan it in the field using the on the fly map function, or not set a required takeoff location (which has altimeter consequences).
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