Back after 10 months of drone free time :-)

Tero

Hi,

I have had DroneLink for 1.5 years or so, but for the last ~10 months I have not had good time and place to fly my Mini. This summer I took Mini out of the case and updated the latest FW and SW. It was good to see that DroneLink has gone forward and there have come many new features and the old features have come better. Jim and the crew have done a good job!

I noticed that before flying with DroneLink, it was almost necessary to check that 101 video series again. This time my learning curve was faster. I fast forwarded most of those videos and had a closer look on some videos. Then I was confident to make mapping plans again and fly the drone.

However, what I still miss is a good written documentation on the SW features. If there is some, I unfortunatelly didn't find on these pages. Eric has touched many of the features on the 101 videos, but there are lots of  parameters which have not been explained anywhere, or I missed those somehow. Some of those features are self-evident for sure, but some of those I really don't understand. For sure, with a trial and error method I could learn, but that is pretty random and slow way and not what I would like. 

E.g. what does this mean?

If I have an achievement value 6s, what does this mean in practice? And these 8 and 6m?

Adding short case sensitive pop-up help texts (a mouse over) for every parameter option would already help a lot and probably would not take more than couple of  precious hours from DroneLink?

1

Comments

4 comments

Date Votes
  • Comment author
    Scott W

    @Tero -- I agree, even with the existing hover text, it isn't clear what "conditions are satisfied" means.  Some documentation detailing each parameter would be helpful.

    I struggled to understand these particular parameters myself, and after some experimentation here is what I concluded about them:

    • The "Achieved state" of the component is reached when the drone has been within horizontal "Distance" and vertical "Altitude" values of the destination coordinates for the amount of "Time" specified.
    • When that "Achieved state" is reached, any "Achieved component" attached to the component is executed and the flight then proceeds with the next motion component.

    In your example, the drone has to be within 8m horizontally and 6m vertically of the coordinates for 6 seconds before the destination is considered "Achieved" (thus executing any Achieved component, and then continuing with the next motion component).

    Increasing the distance and altitude values will cause the "Achieved" state to be reached earlier (i.e., further away from the destination coordinates).  Increasing the Time value will cause the "Achieved" state to be reached later (i.e., extending the time the drone has to be within the distance and altitude ranges).

    If your subscription plan includes "Mission previews", it is pretty easy to experiment with these values and see the results in the "Timeline" of the Mission Preview.  For example, create a Destination component and assign it an "Achieved" component that snaps a photo, then experiment with different values and run Mission Preview to see when the Photo is taken relative to the location and speed of the drone.

    • Setting large values for the Distance+Altitude while setting a small value for Time will generally result in the Achieved state (and photo) occurring before the drone reaches the waypoint -- i.e., while it is still moving.  (May cause a blurry photo!)
    • Setting smaller Distance+Altitude values and/or larger Time value will result in the Achieved state (and photo) occurring closer to (or at) the coordinates, when the drone is moving slowly or hovering.  (Better photo results!)

    Now all that is based on my experience and experimentation.  Hopefully I haven't misinterpreted anything, but if I have then hopefully Jim will jump in with corrections.  :-)

    2
  • Comment author
    Jim McAndrew Dronelink Staff

    You are correct. I get it. Everyone wants actual docs. One of these days I will sit down and do it - until then - Mission Previews are your friend.

    2
  • Comment author
    Tero
    • Edited

    @Scott: Thank you very much for your good explanation. Now these parameters make sense and I understand why the drone did some odd things!

    @Jim: Thank you for listening. It will be a good day when you have published the documentation :-)

    1
  • Comment author
    Jim McAndrew Dronelink Staff

    If you hover over Achievement it tells you:

    0

Please sign in to leave a comment.