Find my drone

Another DJI feature that is not well documented.

It actually works quite well.

I did a little experiment and the screenshot above shows the location of the drone and the options to make the brushless motors beep.

Once again, this is a prime example of how DJI fail to explain how functions of their product and seem to rely on the Internet forums to provide information on them. If you search for "DJI Find my Drone" or "ESC Beeping" you will find many posts that allude to how this function works. However, there is no explanation of what ESC means and how the beeping is to be used in finding the drone.

ESC - is Electronic Speed Control(ler) and it turns out that you can use the controller to made the motors act as a speaker/beeper. This beeping and the Smart LED options appear if you click on the drones location on the map. These buttons will also appear if the drone has been lost for a long(ish) time, see below. and the drones battery is exhausted.

As the forums tell you the beeping and LED functions will not be available unless you still have an RC connection with the drone. The buttons to make the motors beep is triggered by tapping on the "lost location" on the map.This would be the case (hopefully) in the immediate event of a crash or a flyaway as you hopefully would have sufficient battery power left. You will also be able to see the radio (RC) connection signal level, the number of GPS satellites the drone can currently see and the remaining drone battery level. If the drone has performed an automatic RTH due to an RC connection loss of failure to access a sufficient GPS signal the figures you may see are the last recorded values before the loss occurred.

Using your Smartphone, using its own GPS, you will be able to walk or drive to the drone location by viewing your relative position on the map. When you get close you should be able to hear the beeping or see the LEDs. If the battery gets exhausted then this will not be an option.

Even if you don't have an RC connection you will still be able to locate the last recorded co-ordinates by using the map in the dji Go app or even use Google maps to provide you with directions to the drone. You can test the "Find my drone" operation even if you have not lost your drone as the app will record the co-ordinates of the last place that you landed successfully.

The most important feature here is that the "Find my drone" function is useful for both situations where an immediate crash or flyaway has occurred or even when the drone jut goes AWOL and you cannot find it immediately. The information on the last will be stored in the DJI Go app until the next flight has been made. You can check this at anytime by selecting the function from the main screen of the app.

A trip to the coast

Barely an hour and half drive from home.

The seafront and lighthouse at Southwold

Downward vision sensor error

I guess this post will make as much sense as those you will find on DJI related forums.

A couple of times I have seen this system error, the first I managed to clip a few branches in the back yard. So I learnt not to ignore the warning assuming it was the same as the lack of GPS signal and all I needed to do was to get a bit of altitude to get a better look at the satellites. Come to think of this it was not logical as if ground recognition was poor, due to mis-calibration, then it was not likely to improve with more height.

In the first instance, when I was at home, the error went away after re-booting the controller and the Mavic Pro. I got the same error yesterday when I was out on the meadows and decided that it was wise to come up with a better solution to the problem. On perseverance I found a menu setting that allowed me to recalibrate the down-sensors. This involved the movement of the MP in a square formation in front of me while I was holding it above the ground in my left hand. Strangely, this was not to be found anywhere on the forums???? I gave up as I was getting the message that a calibration could not be done on a terrain that was textured, this being the grass of the meadow. So I decided to go back into town and look up a solution in the library on their computers.

Here I found references to the DJI Assistant, which runs on the computer while you have the FP connected directly using a USB cable. This allows you to do the same calibration using the computer screen as a target for the sensors, both forward and downward. I did, however, manage to perform the calibration using just the drone and the "square movement" procedure that I tried in the field. I was hampered in this in finding an unobstructed and texture free area in the back yard and had to resort to the picnic table again. Still, I proved that the same calibration could be performed away from my computer. When enough data had been captured by the sensors the FP seemed to recalibrate in the same way  as it did with the computer. I will be interested to see if this technique appears on the forums, where videos of how to use the Assistant and more prevalent.

There also seemed to be a lack of understanding of the difference between the forward sensors and the downward sensors.

Time to get rid of some stuff

Having been here in the UK for almost 3 years it is time to review some of the things we shipped from Canada.

Some things have not been used, or even taken out of their boxes. A lot of this includes computer equipment. These were things that I could not sell before I left but were too expensive to just trash. Motherboards, HDDs and cases - all not re-assembled are candidates. Especially the magnetic hard drives, I have no idea what is on most of them and having migrated to solid state I don't really care.

Kind of ironic considering the nonsense on having data recovered from such drives. Which I didn't.

Mavic battery maintenance

Looks like it is going to be a no-fly day. Rain has "socked in". Time to discharge the fully charged batteries.

I am surprised that DJI don't promote the use of the USB power adapter for the Intelligent  battery packs. They suggest that you run the rotor motors to do this. Surely this would put an undue wear on them?

If you have multiple iPads and iPhones it is best to use the fully charged packs charging them.