Missing Photos

Looks like signal issues given where it's dropping photos over the trees.

Hi Ryan.

I kept a pretty close eye on the signal strength and am pretty sure it never went below 95% indicated.  Is 95% too low?  While there were trees for sure,  I was very close to the aircraft (~400 ft. including height and horizontal distance) and had full LOS most of the time. 

Next time I power it up, I will pull the .dat file which is the log you are referring to, yes?

Thanks.

@ Adriian, thanks for your input as well.  

Cheers,

Dave

The .csv files that are on your iOS device has much easier to read log files. You can run them through HealthyDrones to analyze them yourself. It is pretty easy to find problems like this.

You can get the log files off using as described in this article:

http://support.dronesmadeeasy.com/hc/en-us/articles/208342893-Accessing-Log-Files

95% is not too low of a signal but 80% is. For some reason the link to the aircraft seems to only let certain things through at different signal strengths.

It is very possible to lose comms within 400 ft if remote antennas are angled the wrong way.

Thanks Ryan,

Well, my observation seems to be borne out by the log.  Mostly 96-100% with a few instances down to 92%.  So, the flight path is uploaded to the craft,  but the specified images are not captured if RC signal falls below ~100%?  This seems like a pretty high bar.

log:  https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1868808/Misc/MapPilot-04-30-2016_16-12-51.csv

Edit:  So I read your response here:  http://support.dronesmadeeasy.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/206660886-Mapping-long-distance

which answers the question part of my comment above.  I understand that having the app adjust when photos need taken is superior to timed capture.  However,  timed capture would be vastly superior to no capture.  Perhaps a timed capture interval could be uploaded to the aircraft as a fallback if it cannot communicate with the app.  Loosing images when the RC signal is still above 90% is problematic for real world use isn't it?

If you are absolutely sure that it wasn't signal strength related you might want to choose a slower image recording speed by changing the SD card setting to a slower card.

We don't really know why triggering the camera requires such high RC signal strength. The telemetry stays intact far below the 85% or so where the camera seems to drop.

The switching between manual and automated imaging won't work with the way the DJI SDK operates.

You might have a hardware issue or something else going on if you were having this issues in close. We have done maps at nearly 2000 meters away with no issues.

I will try a lower speed for the SD card,  However I am skeptical that that is the issue.  I would expect it to skip an image here and there regularly if that were the case.  Not blocks of images.

You say triggering an image appears to be problematic at and below 85%, but it appear to be higher than that.

As far as a hardware issue on my setup, I can only say that in all respects it seems rock solid with the exception of not triggering images in Map Pilot App.  I would add that I know how to aim dipole antennas for the best reception, and the helper antenna aimer in the app is often wrong by a bit for whatever reason.