When pressing START mission, please find the shortest path to the green start point and skip going HOME first

Hello guys,

I really think this will be an awesome feature, I'm not a fan of watching my drone fly itself but when I need to cover high areas it's much easier to keep the overlap of the photos, than to fly it manually, but there is a thing I can do much better than the autonomous software:

When starting the mission I'm looking for the cleanest places, usually try to start from grass and not from the dusty road, so frequently I start near some trees or electricity / internet lines, I would really love to start the mission and fly myself to the direction where the green start point is, and when I'm nearby it to press start, also I can fly more efficiently as while I'm flying manually to that point I also increase altitude, instead of letting the Quad go first vertically to 120m and than go straight to the green dot, it much efficient to go straight to the dot while rising the altitude.

I will quote the answer I got on DJI forum, because I got my answer much faster here I will continue my questions here:)
MapsMadeEasy replied on 2015-12-29 21:44:
"4. ........ With the latest firmware you shouldn't have to take off manually anymore. Doing it the way you are describing will likely cause issues. IMPORTANT: Any time you are going to fly manually, you need to switch it out of F mode unless you are doing small adjustments at landing. Do not expect it to respond as you would expect in a flight mode that is intended to be controlled by a computer."

This seems to be a very bad news for me, why in the next firmware will cause issues if I start the mission manually ? Please can you give me more details ?

PS. Really guys, I think this is the first forum I seen in the last 10 years (yes, 10 years) that doesn't support simple text formatting and photos uploading, it's 2016 (almost) !!! .. and btw Happy New Year to all you guys!

Ovidiu Sopa December 31, 2015 07:17

Official comment

We will not likely do this for safety reasons. Not everyone has big clearances around their takeoff area and the most universal way to do it is to go straight up to the cruising altitude. The diagonal automated takeoff does some weird things sometimes.

The idea behind our app is that we are automating the process of taking mapping data and to do that some generalization needs to occur to take as many possibilities into account as possible.

Previously, you the DJI SDK forced users to manually take off to an elevation of 5 meters before uploading the mission. It not longer forces that but I believe you can still do it without issue.

This isn't really a forum. It is a Q and A help center. We use Zendesk for our customer support tracking and while it is limited in its capabilities it is pretty spam proof and doesn't have many lost emails which turns out is a big deal. When Zendesk adds more capabilities we will have them.

Tudor December 31, 2015 17:20

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2 comments

But it can't be implemented even if the altitude is reached ?

I understand what you say but in my opinion is just a simple check:
- if the mission altitude is reached, find the shortest path to the green start point
- if the mission altitude is not reached, do what you do now, climb to that altitude and than go to the green point

This way you'll be on the safe side, nothing could go wrong when the START button is pressed and also make users like me happy as we can fly more efficiently and shorten our fly times.

Please consider it, if it's implemented how I'm thinking it should create any issues!

About the auto takeoff feature I'm not really impressed, I still think it's safest for users to manually takeoff to a safe altitude and than press START.

Ovidiu Sopa January 01, 2016 18:51 0 votes