Size of the map with the latest update
I am getting the warning that maximum size of the map have been reach (please fly higher or reduce the map size). Is dronelink restricting the size of the map that we can upload. At least tell us upfront.
Regards.
Comments
30 comments
Their not restricting you It’s just new warning due to the size at 100 acres or more. Always better to create smaller segments rather then one large map. Maps take a lot of processing and you may encounter errors. Since you will need to perform battery swaps with larger maps anyway it’s just easier to create smaller ones and fly one at a time with less chance of issues. If there is an issue on any of them you would only need fly the one which may have had problems instead of rerunning the entire large map. Hope this helps.
Too many people were ignoring the map size warning and then complaining about the poor performance / bad user experience when trying to perform maps that would take 2+ hours to actually complete (many, many battery swaps). Version 3.4.0 changed the warning to an error message and disallows large maps based on these limits. To be clear, you can still create large maps, you just need to split your map plan across multiple missions due to the current limitations of the algorithm. We viewed this as an acceptable interim solution because the reality is you will be many battery swaps in (even with the new limits), and you will likely have to reposition your takeoff location multiple times if you actually want to maintain signal / LOS, so loading a new mission isn't that much extra overhead in these cases. Having said that, per the second link above, we are well aware of the situation and do intend to add better support for large missions over time.
Here is the proposed messaging:
It's released now - just refresh your browser.
Hello is there a way to bypass that error and continue building larger maps. i work for a forestry company in B.C Canada we are planning on mapping about 7000ha this summer have completed 1000ha so far good weather days i can do 500ha (1200acers) per day with the Mavic air 2 .This spring we switched to using drone link for its efficiency, large maps , dynamic home point, very efficient multi battery flight, ect. Many blocks/ polygons that we map are around 100-200ha (250acers-500acers) we have never experienced signal loss of poor performance. I build map flight plans to later create orthomosaics. I usually start to separate the areas into different missions once the drone will be going more than 1-1.3km from takeoff location. By limiting us to 40ha it has made your software very un efficient for us, both in the office now planning 6 missions having to make 6 different kml files instead of 1 and in the field by having to now go back and forth from the mission area back to the truck to swap and start charging batteries then back to mission area as where we used to have "hub" in the middle of the mapping area with a geny set up to continuously charge battery's as it is flying its 1+h missions, with the longer missions you are also using all the battery the drone has and landing at 15% usually vs smaller missions it may finish and return with 50% so you cant send it up on another mission and you still have to go though cool dawn and recharge but only got half the batter.
What mobile device are you using? Can you share one of the larger maps that you were doing that didn't have performance issues? We are open to giving the user a choice to ignore the warning, but we might have to make it much more obvious and annoying - like a dialog that gives much more details about the potential bad user experience (especially if you are using an older or under-powered device), and maybe even a second confirmation dialog stating that you really understand and aren't going to complain...
mobile device used for flying the mission is a Huawei p30 pro (6gb ram) almost all missions are outside cell coverage or WIFI so all missions are downloaded for offline use. Mission planning in office is done on either an acer aspire 12gb ram 940mx graphics or an Alienware x17 r2 64gb ram 3080ti graphics. i am very ok with having bigger warnings even clicking i accept box or something when doing large maps warning about performance issues . This is a block i flew yesterday had high wind tolerance selected and its was 20km wind gusting to 40km occasionally and never had a single issue
https://app.dronelink.com/alexander-airey/100-mile-contract/plan/dV2qz2taGY6exyOOWAoM/r6lq3mZOg7PeOHkB5Dfi
i have flown larger blocks but this was recent and one of the bigger ones
only issue i have ran into but didn't seem limited to large maps was "drone too far off course D23M" and not on a windy day, the drone appeared to be well within 23m though so my solution was to increase the tolerance to something like 50m and have had no issues. On days where i get the too far off course message when i do post processing of the images the overlap is still around 75-78% planned was 80% so still very good overlap with it being "off course"
Here is my user experience with that mission plan:
iPhone 12 pro
iPad Pro (M1)
Pixel 6
Android was definitely better, but overall a pretty bad experience in my opinion. The original goal of the loading and estimate process was to have it work in less than 1 second, which is true for most Dronelink mission plans that people are creating.
so just for easy talk lets say it took 1 min to load or even if it took 5 min to load. by limiting the are to 40 ha that means that this map will have to be cut into 4 or 5 different missions so i first have to cut our polygon into 5 polygons then export as kmz or kml. import the files then i will have to plan plan 5 different missions so the office time has now increased by a couple hours. not to mention as i said in the previous comment the longer it takes/ un efficiency's doing multi battery's flights so you have saved me 1 or even 5 min in loading time but cost me a few hour's doing all the extra steps.
another suggestion or work around is to maybe is to have these limits on the hobbyist plans, but not on the business plans
I should have been more clear: the loading and estimation time is just half of the issue. As you have seen, other strange behavior can start to happen, like the drone too far off course message which caused you to change a setting to a potentially unsafe value. In the end if the user understands the situation and takes responsibility, what else can we say? Maybe just give people enough rope to hang themselves with, as long as they know that is what's happening...
well as for your " bad experience in my opinion" i think its a horrible experience to increase the planning time by hours. vs waiting 1 min in the field. its not like im planning 1 mission now and then so its no big deal we just got anther contract a couple days ago that will be 400 block about 470 polygons so i had planned about 20min/ pollygon to fully plan so 150h of building flight plans, now it takes sometimes as much as 5x as long to build the block it could potently take me 400h more! talk about a bad experience. We had switched away from using other software like pix4dcature and drone deploy due to there inefficiency's, but now drone deploy is more efficient. As for giving people enough rope to hang themselves how about the fact i can build a flight plan that will go to 10,000M AGL or more, definitely no issues, defiantly not hugely illegal (at least in Canada ) how about flying in controlled air space, you can build a plan wherever you want as well but bigger than 40 ha big safety issues apparently. if you don't think people understand the risks or problems with flying big areas than maybe change some of you other huge safety problems in the software.
Here is a link to a plan that takes off in a middle of a runway at Toronto person international that will fly at 384,400,000M so it might get hit by the moon, glad i can only fly a 40ha map
https://app.dronelink.com/alexander-airey/my-first-project/plan/wVhYYV0KUajJsn3EPgQB/ehvimQDmIObWRn9quPj5
As for the too far off Couse as i said its not just limited to large blocks it has happened twice so far once on a block about 15 ha and once on a larger 45 ha block, so limiting us wont solve that problem. and like said in the post processing of the images the actual flight path wasn't off course without actually measuring the flight path just eyeballing it, it was more like 3-5M "off course" still vary reasonable for having wind affect it. At the end of the day I don't want to get in a big pissing match all i want to do is my job efficiently and it was efficient and SAFE before these changes, i understand some people must've had performance issues but some people weren't like myself i just want to import a kml build a grid and go fly. I thought dronelink made it very clear that loss of property or damage isn't drone links fault and ultimately the pilot is always responsible for his or her drone. Please feel free to reach me via email (same one on my account) and we can continue this conversation not on a pubic form.
Thank you for your comments I agree with you 100%. I was able to load large maps before and some die hard fans of dronelink even accuse me of not knowing what is mapping. 40 hectares per map is ridiculous to start of with. I hope dronelink gives us the option to create whatever size that we want no matter how silly they might think it is.
To be clear, it isn’t that we think it is silly. It is more that we know the current limitations of the algorithms and we are frustrated when people ignore the warnings and then complain anyway. Large maps are a thing and we definitely want to make the system handle these use cases better - it is just going to take time.
When I first got dronelink I was not using it for sometime because of drone to far off course issue. Now that it was resolve I am actually very happy with dronelink and it my go to app for mapping. With this current restriction the feeling I am getting is exactly like when I got dronelink and not being able to use it. Ask anyone who does a little mapping 100 acres is just to small and a waste of the battery and time. Thanks
99% of all maps in DL are less than 100 acres…but again, we understand that large maps are a thing for people doing serious work. What mobile device are you on?
I am currently using the Poco X3 Pro.
I think that is an awesome pop up message ! It explains the potential problems very clearly, hot to avoid potential problems The user has to take responsibility if something goes wrong not drone link. I hope this will solve drone links issues with people complaining about poor performance at the same time allowing others to continue using it as we were before.
Prefect hopeful solution ! also very impressive work on the speed of this, thankyou.
I have big problems with dronelink since last update.
It tells me to "subscribe" even tho I bought elite membership 7 days ago, is this a common issue with new updates?
Please email support@dronelink.com with billing issues.
excellent work Jim! Dronelink the best of the best
Thanks - we would be grateful if you left a 5-star review in the App Store saying that! (iOS | Android)
finally after a couple days of bad weather got out and did about 5h of flying, couple polygons ranging from 60-140ha and had no issues. Thankyou for your quick work and update on this.
Nice that you are able to create polygons larger that 60ha. Tried importing kml file about 100ha still having same issue of webpage still not responding with "wait notification" and crashing after that. Maybe because it is a hobbyist account.
hmm interesting i have had the wait notification when i accidently load verryyyy large files like 400ha+, go figure big file and un-flyable in one shot. But if i leave it alone for a couple min it will load up. One thing to speed up the planning or possibly something drone link could do is when you load a kml it sets the flight altitude to like 30m or so (don't remember exactly) so it is planning a long flight path distance vs loading at 125m. To speed things up for me on large blocks once it loads i set flight altitude to something like 10,000M then i can change boundary points and tweak it without the software re configuring the flight path every move, once I'm happy with the perimeter the i set it to the actual altitude i want
Anyway there may be a difference for enterprise vs hobbyist but I found a way around it so I am good for now. Just need to take a few more steps in the preparation of the kml file. Nice that it works out for you. I use big maps just to get an indication of the terrain anyway.
There is not difference between hobbyist and business, at least from a performance standpoint. When the browser hangs due to importing a large file, it just means the algorithm can’t handle it, which is exactly why we put in the limitation in the first place…but you guys didn’t like it so now you have the rope….
Noted with thanks.
i still think the new way is better. I'm sure you guys (dronelink) know this but there seems to be a closer relation in performance relative to total distance, than there is for map area. eg performance of a 30ha map at 30m flight elevation is worse than a 60ha map at 125m. For me at my work all my maps are flown at 122M max height for canada. so even though some of the maps i am flying are large in ha the total flight distance isn't huge so im not experiencing performance issues or they are minimal and totally acceptable, so PN if you are trying to fly lower with high overlap on a large area the flight distance will be way to much for the algorithm as Jim has been saying
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