DJI GO app disconnected but aircraft still flying

[reversevector]

Talking about freaky moments, I just had the bird freeze in mid air after I stopped a running Litchi waypoint mission. I couldn't move it in F or P mode, it just sat there hovering, and even toggling RTH mode on the remote didn't work.

The best (worst?) part was that it was 1000 m away. Then the video feed froze, the remote disconnected - I spent the next five minutes in a cold sweat, trying Litchi and DJI Go repeatedly and turning the remote on and off a few times.

Finally it reconnected but still I couldn't move the bird or even yaw the gimbal. I ran Litchi again and noticed the mission was still on hold, so I hit the resume button and then the Home button. Finally it headed home.

Luckily it didn't run out of power and do a forced landing in a flooded rice field or an irrigation ditch. There's something about Litchi's waypoint mode that turns the bird into a fully autonomous aircraft. It's kinda scary that it'll go its merry way without RTHing if the remote link is lost. In FPV mode, it always does an RTH on remote signal loss.

 

[phantom1972]

I had a disconnect on my P4, was way out of sight (shame, shame), but RTH worked like a champ. I was worried for a bit, justifiably judging from some of the replies to this. I would have hoped RTH from the controller would trump anything screwed up a hung app could cause. In my case it did.

 

[reversevector]

I had a disconnect on my P4, was way out of sight (shame, shame), but RTH worked like a champ. I was worried for a bit, justifiably judging from some of the replies to this. I would have hoped RTH from the controller would trump anything screwed up a hung app could cause. In my case it did.

The funny part was that I could hear the P3 buzzing away in the distance but I couldn't see it. It's weird that RTH toggling didn't work and the bird didn't initiate RTH when the remote disconnected, it was stuck just hovering there.

I should come up with a failure checklist instead of randomly turning things on and off. In a flyaway or an emergency, you only have a few minutes before the drone comes crashing down. How do I pull Litchi flight logs to find out what the heck happened?

 

[bsartist]

The funny part was that I could hear the P3 buzzing away in the distance but I couldn't see it. It's weird that RTH toggling didn't work and the bird didn't initiate RTH when the remote disconnected, it was stuck just hovering there.

I should come up with a failure checklist instead of randomly turning things on and off. In a flyaway or an emergency, you only have a few minutes before the drone comes crashing down. How do I pull Litchi flight logs to find out what the heck happened?

That is disconcerting. I would hope that low battery would trigger smart RTH if you had it enabled.

If you are in iOS you get the logs through the file sharing feature of iTunes.

 

[reversevector]

That is disconcerting. I would hope that low battery would trigger smart RTH if you had it enabled.

If you are in iOS you get the logs through the file sharing feature of iTunes.

I guess the final failsafe would be a low battery RTH. Hopefully there would be enough power left to fly over 1000 m on a low battery.

I ran the Litchi CSV logs through PhantomHelp's log viewer and all I saw were "Downlink lost" and "Downlink restored after 2s" messages. I think pausing the waypoint mode could have put the bird into a loop and made it unresponsive to other commands. Only resuming and then cancelling the mission got it working again.