why did my drone lower itself into a tree and crash instead of RTH?

I set up my flight, uploaded it, and set it off.

The app crashed on the last leg of the flight. It hovered there for a few minutes. After starting the app back up and waiting there was no reaction. Recalling the app said it would execute a RTH (at 100m) I turned off the remote control.

The drone did not execute a return to home, instead it slowly lowered itself into a tree, crashed and broke.

It still had at least 25% battery (second LED flashing) so I don't believe it was an emergency landing.

I'm obviously disappointed but trying to learn what went wrong.

Should I downgrade to a DJI mini 2 so I don't have to use an old android 11 phone? (Pixel 3)

Follydelphia 08 juillet 2023 23:51

Commentaire officiel

We are sorry to hear you had an incident. The Mini 3 is controlled by virtual stick controls which means it is driven by the app issuing stick position commands as if you were flying it on your own. In the case of an app crash the aircraft would not be receiving these commands so by default it falls back to hovering for a bit while it waits for a reconnection. If that reconnection does not occur it will head for home. At this point the app is no longer involved.

I am not sure why you would turn off the remote. Hitting the return to home button on the remote is the best way to bring it home.

Depending on the outside temperature and how recently the batteries were calibrated that 25% reading can be way off and the aircraft thought it was an emergency. If you got the aircraft back you could get the onboard log files from it and send them to DJI for analysis. They could tell you what actually happened.

The Mini 3 is a fine aircraft but the SDK support for it is limited. Hopefully DJI will update the Enterprise SDK at some point so newer versions of Android are supported.

Zane 10 juillet 2023 15:55

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Thanks Zane, I guess I panicked and didn't think of the RTH button on the controller. I figured disconnecting would initiate the RTH (which I think is what the software says).

I will try to check the logs of the DJI to see what happened.

Is there any way to see why the app crashed? What should happen when it relaunches?

Is the best bet to get a DJI Mini 2 and that will be fully supported with modern android versions?

Follydelphia 10 juillet 2023 17:49 0 votes

There is no way to tell why the app crashed from the log file. It just stops because it wasn't being written to any longer.

Map Pilot Pro for Android is currently crash free for 99.81% of users as measured by Google Crashlytics. We don't see any crashes in the logs from that date. For some reason the Google Pixel device crash more than almost any other device. We are not sure why but have put a TON of work in to make the app as crash-free as possible.

The Mini 2 isn't really future proof either though. Maybe just look into getting a better Android 11 device? We use the TripleTek tablets for testing and they are pretty awesome.

Zane 11 juillet 2023 14:36 0 votes