Inspire 2 "Photo Error"

Hi, I am also suffering with the "Photo Error" message on my Inspire 2, using the fastest SD cards Sandisk Extreme Pro, freshly formatted. I can fly a 15 Hectare field with no issues, then I fly another field with a fresh card and get the Photo error after say about 10 minutes. I am using an X4S camera. 

When the Photo Error occurs no further photos are taken and I have to return to home and restart the Inspire to be able to continue the mission.

There does not seem to be any way of resetting the camera in the air.

BTW my mission takes 65 minutes with a class 3 card. If I change the settings to Class 1 it would take 81 minutes

80% of SD cards we see in our shop are counterfeit. Only purchase SD cards from reputable camera shops and do the work to benchmark them to make sure they do what the label says it does... 

In the Map Pilot settings you can slow the SD card write speed down to 2.5 seconds/image or even 3 seconds/image. This will slow the flight down but will help ensure that the images get taken properly. 

Kim: It sounds like your issue might be something different. The 'Photo Error' warning can mean a few different things. Try using our most recent LITE version of the app which has some additional diagnostic stuff in it. It may tell you more information.  

Just been looking at the Log file and there do not seem to be any messages logged when the error happens and the camera stops firing.

It would be good to get some audible bleep if the camera has stopped taking pictures, at the moment I have to watch the entire flight on screen.

As mentioned if I slow the camera down the mission will take significantly longer and I will start using too many batteries.

BTW I have purchased all of my cards direct from Amazon themselves, not a re seller.

There is a audible beep at RC value less than 85% which is when this starts happening. Also, there is a popup that says "Photo Error". 

Buying them from Amazon is your first mistake... Go ahead and benchmark them to see if they are even close to the specs. They won't be. 

Here is how Amazon works: Sketchy Co ships 1000 counterfeit cards into Amazon to sell. Amazon puts them in one (or more) distribution centers. You live next to one of the distribution centers and purchase the same product from Amazon, not Sketchy Co. Amazon ships you one of the counterfeit cards that Sketchy Co sourced. Meanwhile, people that live near other distribution centers that purchase the same product will get cards sourced from somewhere else. Fun! 

What bench-marking method do you use on sd cards? Crystal Disk Mark?

That is what we have on our lab machines. We use some internal tools for it but most do the same thing: Test input and output of various sizes. Use the same tool across your set of SD cards and you will be amazed at the variability. 

We push the cameras to their specified limits per the DJI documentation. If there is anything wrong (too hot, too slow, too full) it will cause a timing issue and the camera will start to fall behind. Even on fast cards we see it taking longer than 2 seconds to actually get the image to disk a lot of the time. If you are doing long passes it will start to fall behind. The turnarounds are the camera's chance to catch up. 

Hi Zane, thanks for the reply. 

I'm mapping 1200ha, so prefer not to slow the craft down if possible, it's already a big job. I believe all cards to be genuine Sandisk Extreme Pro, but Crystal Disk Mark won't detect any SD card storage on any of our PCs for some reason. However, this error *only* occurs in Shutter Priority or Manual Exposure - Automatic is fine, no error message at all.

The bucking is happening on both our Inspire 2 and P4P and is only present when using Map Pilot, tested 3 other mapping apps and it was not present. One i2 has 250+ hrs and the other is brand new, less than 1hr. All machines had a cold IMU calibration before the flights in question.

Thanks for clearing up the difference in flight lines between active connect / connectionless. I noticed that by decreasing the mission speed it also shortens the area of over run outside the polygon, which makes sense. 

During this large mapping mission we did encounter some other bugs, both i2's frequently reported "Battery level not sufficient, please change" before take off, even though at 100% charge and required multiple powercycles to correct.

Both X4S would twitch from side to side at random (can send you video privately if required) whilst using the Map Pilot App - again not present in other apps flying the same settings in the same area and conditions. 

One last thing I would have paid money for during this mission would be aperture control. It seems like Map Pilot tries to keep the aperture around 4.5 - 6 whilst slowing the shutter? With a low sun here in the winter I'd happily shoot at 2.8 / iso200 and a fast shutter speed rather than f6.5 1/200 iso400. 

Thanks

"this error *only* occurs in Shutter Priority or Manual Exposure - Automatic is fine, no error message at all"

This is likely because the camera has to switch modes a bit internally to take these kinds of images. If you are working on those types of modes I would slow things down some more. 

"The bucking is happening on both our Inspire 2 and P4P and is only present when using Map Pilot"

We haven't heard this complaint from any other users in the last bunch of years. If the apps are all using waypoint flight I don't know what would be any different. We use the P4P without issues all the time and so do thousands of other users daily. 

The battery stuff has been addressed in newer version of Map Pilot. We hope to release Map Pilot to 4.0.4 soon.

We recommend pausing the mission at the top of the climb and adjusting the aperture using the right click wheel. 

I have tested my cards Sandisk Exreme Pro Cards (64gb) and they all seem to checkout fine, I am getting 86.69 MBytes/s write speed with CrystalDiskMark.

I have now reduced my Overlap from 80% to 75% and reduced the max fly speed to 4Mps from the 5Mps and I and am still getting the Photo Error with Shutter Priority.

Please see the log below where the camera stops with a Photo Error and I do a RTH. It is interesting that it is taking a photo after the RTH is selected that is over exposed. I had the same symptoms on another field. It would be useful if the Photo Errors were added to the log.

'Photo' and 'Photo Error' are not the same thing. 'Photo' is the timestamp for when the app tells the aircraft to take a photo. 'Photo Error' in the log means that it told the aircraft to take a picture and the aircraft said NO (likely because it is busy). 

What you are showing that log is the normal behavior. 

OK I appreciate that, however 8m 7s Photo repeated 2 times and then no actual photos taken until 09m 00s after I had aborted the flight because no further photos were being taken. I agree that it looks like the camera is crashing. I wish it was consistent because I went onto fly another field that took over 30 minutes with the same settings and that worked fine. I guess if nobody else has this problem then it may be related to my camera.

The 'Photo' mark says when the camera was told to take a picture. The filename coming back says that that filename was written successfully. These filename marks get dropped frequently when there is poor connectivity so you can't really count on them being in the log file. 

Look at the images that are on the SD card to see what is actually going on. The DJI_0155 that comes up quite a bit later is a bit weird. It is possible that message was queued up in there somewhere and came out then. It was likely triggered at 8 07. 

Great to hear the Inspire 2 battery level issue will be resolved. 

Not sure what else to do in regards to the bucking, sun is really low in the sky right now, thought it might have been bouncing around in the forward anti collision sensors - have experienced this in Go4, turned sensors off in Go4 but didn't appear to solve the issue.

Zane, can you please clarify which camera settings can be altered with the right click wheel? 

What I am seeing:

Auto Exposure: ISO / EV
Shutter Priority: ISO / EV / Shutter
Manual Exposure: ISO / Shutter / Aperture 

Is this correct? I guess what I am asking for is Aperture Priority, being able to lock aperture + ISO and allow the shutter to be set on automatic. Is that a possibility for the future? 

Also, when using the right click wheel, it would be amazing if the adjustable camera parameter was highlighted when selected.....

Cheers