I know we've chatted about auto-land situations before but I'm wondering if something has changed in the firmware/app changing the process.
I was deliberately pushing the battery somewhat on farmland behind my property and as I was returning 'home' with the battery at 12% it decided to go into autoland. It was my previous experience that you could cancel this on the app by touching the "tap to cancel" or at least maintain a hover with throttle application and be able to navigate to a suitable forced landing site. Unfortunately it did not and down it went. I had a 350 meter walk to a grassy field to collect it so no harm done, but that could have equally have been a lake or worse.
So before the usual "just learn & fly within battery limits, distance" comments flow, I want to say that it's my Phantom and I am fully cognisant of the 'limits' of the batteries BUT auto landing at 12% is BS.
My P4 touched down with 11% battery remaining and the thing remained 'on' and transmitting data & video for the next 20 minutes while I made my way to it. When I got to it, the batt level was like 8% and all cells perfectly balanced, so the battery had not 'crashed'.
The only thing I will say is that the battery was pretty warm, marginally warmer than previous full flights, the ambient temperature was quite hot too (30deg). That being said, I am not aware of temperature related actions inside the flight software, plus of course, the internal resistance of Lipos reduces with heat making them more efficient although I will grant you that there are limits.
So anyhoo, when did they stop allowing us to delay auto-land via throttle and when did they disable the "tap to cancel"? You could ask why they have the App give you a chance to cancel at all if they are going to ignore it.
Lastly, how are we running the Lipos down to 5% now? Just having it sit doing nothing whilst the lipos slowly creep down to 5% is suicide for the lightbridge transmitter without airflow.
I was deliberately pushing the battery somewhat on farmland behind my property and as I was returning 'home' with the battery at 12% it decided to go into autoland. It was my previous experience that you could cancel this on the app by touching the "tap to cancel" or at least maintain a hover with throttle application and be able to navigate to a suitable forced landing site. Unfortunately it did not and down it went. I had a 350 meter walk to a grassy field to collect it so no harm done, but that could have equally have been a lake or worse.
So before the usual "just learn & fly within battery limits, distance" comments flow, I want to say that it's my Phantom and I am fully cognisant of the 'limits' of the batteries BUT auto landing at 12% is BS.
My P4 touched down with 11% battery remaining and the thing remained 'on' and transmitting data & video for the next 20 minutes while I made my way to it. When I got to it, the batt level was like 8% and all cells perfectly balanced, so the battery had not 'crashed'.
The only thing I will say is that the battery was pretty warm, marginally warmer than previous full flights, the ambient temperature was quite hot too (30deg). That being said, I am not aware of temperature related actions inside the flight software, plus of course, the internal resistance of Lipos reduces with heat making them more efficient although I will grant you that there are limits.
So anyhoo, when did they stop allowing us to delay auto-land via throttle and when did they disable the "tap to cancel"? You could ask why they have the App give you a chance to cancel at all if they are going to ignore it.
Lastly, how are we running the Lipos down to 5% now? Just having it sit doing nothing whilst the lipos slowly creep down to 5% is suicide for the lightbridge transmitter without airflow.