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mapping with sub 250g drone, ie mini 2

I am an American who is planning to map some archeological sites in Europe this fall.  My first research led me to want to use Dronelink and Maps Made Easy.  One complication is that I need to use a sub 250g drone.  When the Autel EVO nano plus was announced, I thought that would be a great drone, with a 50 MP camera.  But they are having some problems, and it appears none of the desired apps will have an interface to it any time soon.

The DJI mini 3 (out in the next month or two?) would probably also have a high resolution camera, but it appears that it would probably be some months after its release before Dronelink could interface with it?  So, that leads me to the DJI mini 2, which can interface to Dronelink but is only 12 MP photos.  I have seen here that the mini 2 photos are missing some info that requires some work arounds in Maps Made Easy.  I also see that Map Pilot Pro does not support the mini 2 - maybe it will the mini 3?

Can anyone give me some guidance on how successful a Mini 2 with Maps Made Easy is - such as the number of photos and time needed compared to with one of the higher resolution drones that does not meet my 250 g requirement?

Another note - I would like to work with data I have in Google Earth as far as ancient routes from archeological studies inserted as overlays into Google Earth.

Any and all advice will very much be appreciated.

Mark Gredler

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I wouldn't plan on the Autel Nano being supported any time soon. Their SDK isn't super reliable. 

For anything to be supported DJI has to release iOS SDK support for it first so we can talk to it. They have not done so with the Mini 2 yet. So I would imagine the Mini 3 will be a while. We plan on supporting the Mini 2 when we are capable of doing so. 

The Mini 2 is supported by the DJI Specific workflow in Maps Made Easy even though it is missing some tag info. In any case the Classic workflow would work with any image has the most basic GPS tags. The Mini 2 camera is actually pretty decent. Optical quality is more important that megapixels.

You can use the Mavic Pro and Map Pilot Pro to estimate numbers of images since the cameras are pretty similar.

You can elect to generate KMZ files when processing your images with Maps Made Easy. 

Zane
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Thank you so much for such a helpful and rapid response!

To clarify - when you say you need the iOS SDK support, you mean for Maps Made Easy, or Map Pilot Pro, or both?

And you do not support android at all?  I did note that the mini 2 support in Dronelink is only for android.

Mark Gredler 0 votes
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Map Pilot Pro is the iOS app that talks to your drone. It requires software from DJI in order to do so. Maps Made Easy is our processing website. You upload images to it. 

We do not support Android devices with Map Pilot Pro. But you can upload images that are collected using other apps to Maps Made Easy for processing as long as they follow our Data Collection guidelines. 

Zane 0 votes
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