Flytrex Live is here! now what?

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Gr8Chef said:
Dirty Bird - could the erroneous readings you received with your maiden Flytrex Live flight have been caused by weak or intermittent 2G signal?

I'm not really sure but I don't believe that was the problem. In my area (Baltimore/Washington, D.C. corridor) 2G coverage is extensive. and the Live links up quickly. On my flight, it recorded the first leg to the farthest point, and that is where my mission ended according to my flight log. This is also where my Phantom is currently located...not good! I then performed an RTH to overhead and flew off several thousand feet ~120 degrees from the first leg, RTH back overhead, and flew off several thousand feet ~120 degrees in the next direction. When I landed, the Flytrex LED was flashing green, so it had network connectivity.

I did power it back on a couple times thinking it would upload the remainder of the mission and update its location. It connected to the network without a problem but never updated. That concerns me as the primary reason I bought the Live was to have the ability to find my bird should it become lost.
 
Not good. Not good. So I'm suppose to remove my perfectly good working Core 2 tomorrow and install the Live I just received in the mail??? arggggghhh. I already want to return it but not looking forward to the response and customer support I might receive in attempting to return this. The entire missions are suppose to be cached to memory??? More reports on partial mission recordings and spotty coverage for 2G??? Not liking my $200 predicament
 
Scott I'm going to wait for my next flight and see how that one goes. Maybe something just happened weird on the first one? My flight log was funny...it had my altitude correct but it showed I had traveled .7 miles but showed distance traveled as 9'. ;)

I would not remove your Core 2, just disconnect the GPS plug and leave it installed. It weighs so little it won't affect flight.
 
From the other flytrex thread 7 members had PM'd me, (apparently they didn't want to post publicly for their own reasons) and 4 of them were saying they were either sending back the FLT or going to refuse it when it arrived at their house. Some mentioned being disgusted that the real info on the FLT's were now surfacing, and not one bit of these kind of details were available when they researching prior to purchase. They felt mislead and now don't want to deal with someone that shows to be dishonest. Another member said with finding out about the 2G issue that there was no way (his words) in hell the FLT is worth $150 more then the Core2. I knew about the 2G but I'll admit I didn't take the time to see what the 2G coverage in my area was like before hand either. In the only email I received from flytrex had contained info related to what is being discussed here now. At the time of receiving this info it had nothing to do with the issues that were sent to them. But this shows a couple of options being considered,with the one best for the US to not being ready for another couple of months.

We are now working in two directions to address this and improve things. The first is providing more information on our web-site. We plan to add shortly a new page that lists more information about the different networks and plans for all different countries our users are using the Live with. This will make it easier for new users to find more information about the process they will need to go to get the Live working in their country. This is the short-term solution and we hope to get this available in a few days.
A slightly longer term solution we plan on doing is start offering the Live with a built-in service as one package. This requires some more work since we need to setup agreements with actual carriers at selected countries - planning to start this at the states. Once this option is available, the initial setup for new users should be MUCH easier and straightforward. We hope to get this ready in a few months from now as well.

My goal is to get communication restored with flytrex , and hopefully get some additions added to the FLT to make it a more suitable device. I'm waiting to here back from them now. Here is just a bit I mentioned to them that goes along with what I said above. Read it, and you might even want to add to it.

If the FLT can transmit a signal say once every 30 minutes for even 12 hours is hopes of getting marked by a GPS satellite, would make the FLT useful. Take a couple of minutes and think about having the FLT in it’s current state with it’s current abilities in this situation I will describe here:

Say I’m hovering at a altitude of 3,000 feet with a 5 mph wind gust. I lose connection to my transmitter leaving me unable to have any control to my quad. The quad hovers until it completely uses all battery supply and begins free falling towards the ground. Throughout the fall, the quad has a drift associated to it from the 5mph wind gust. The quad finally crash lands on the ground. The question is, where is the quad located? I know from experience, the quads location will be marked at it’s last transmitted GPS location before the battery lost all power........ It’s situations like this is why the FLT needs a small power supply attached so that it can be a useful device.

For those of you that don't know, the FLT is attached to our quads power source. When the quads power expires so does that of the FLT's power. It will not track or mark a location without power. For me this is the FLT's #1 red flag. This tracker will not function in anyway beyond what the DJI app does if using the "Find My Phantom Vision Plus" feature. As I say hopefully I can work with them and get some added suggestions in the mix.
 
flyNfrank said:
This tracker will not function in anyway beyond what the DJI app does if using the "Find My Phantom Vision Plus" feature...
Not entirely true... The GPS location beaconed via the 'Find my Phantom' feature is sent via the 2.4 wifi... If you lost the 2.4 wifi signal while the Phantom is still traveling, your last known GPS location will no longer reflect the actual location of the Phantom (provided you are not able to regain a 2.4 wifi connection before the battery expires). Assuming the the phantom in the same event auto landed at a later point in time (wifi signal still lost), and also assuming there is a 2G signal that the Flytrex recognizes, by design, the Flytrex will beacon it's location via the cellular infrastructure back to their central server and reflect that location on your Flytrex Live site (in spite of the wifi signal being lost). In this situation, the 'Find my Phantom' and Flytrex are both reporting two vary different last known locations, with the Flytrex location being the most accurate one. Of course, you can draw up many other scenarios (i.e. no 2G service) where the Flytrex wouldn't provide a location at all... My point is simply that the Flytrex Live last known location feature is in no way functionally equivalent (or less reliable in all circumstances) to the 'Find my Phantom' feature... In different scenarios, one could provide a more accurate last known location over the other. I look at the Flytrex as another layer of protection for a lost phantom... just one more data point to use in the event of the unthinkable... Having said this, I'm very disappointed to hear reports that indicate the mission recording reliability of the Flytrex Live is inferior to the Core 2. I hope this doesn't prove to be true from my own experience.... will find out soon...
 
Dirty Bird said:
I would not remove your Core 2, just disconnect the GPS plug and leave it installed. It weighs so little it won't affect flight.
that was already part of the plan... ;)

12 months or less until End Of Life for current Flytrex Live users in the US??

"T-Mobile is now promising to rid itself of its sludge-like 2G Edge network in favor of LTE by mid-2015. "
Excerpt from: http://consumerist6.blogspot.com/2014/0 ... ntire.html
 
AT&T shuts theirs down Jan 2017, so 30 months total, perhaps.
Still not worth the cash for such fast-approaching obsolescence.
 
Flytrex Live UPDATE: I just did a second flight. This one recorded 11:52 out of 20+ minutes. One entire leg of the flight is missing...somehow its the leg in the middle of the rest of the flight sequence??? She landed on my driveway with the Flytrex LED blinking green (connected) and 10 sats locked, yet her "last seen" location is two blocks away approximately 350' away from her actual location. The location accuracy is NOT making me feel confident about relying on the Live for finding a downed bird!

(BTW I left it powered on for 10 minutes after the flight to make sure the Live had plenty of time to transmit)
 
Morgon said:
AT&T shuts theirs down Jan 2017, so 30 months total, perhaps.
Still not worth the cash for such fast-approaching obsolescence.

Point of clarification concerning AT&T shutting down 2G, I learned from an AT&T Technician that they have already started shutting down 2G services. So it will not be like a light switching off in 2017. Apparently, it will be more of a systematic shutdown by territory in the U.S. This is how I learned that my area's 2G service was part of the early termination.
 
Dirty Bird said:
Flytrex Live UPDATE: I just did a second flight. This one recorded 11:52 out of 20+ minutes. One entire leg of the flight is missing...somehow its the leg in the middle of the rest of the flight sequence??? She landed on my driveway with the Flytrex LED blinking green (connected) and 10 sats locked, yet her "last seen" location is two blocks away approximately 350' away from her actual location. The location accuracy is NOT making me feel confident about relying on the Live for finding a downed bird!

(BTW I left it powered on for 10 minutes after the flight to make sure the Live had plenty of time to transmit)

Another issue I noticed is some of the flight speed is off. Some flights recorded going over 75mph
 
My speed seems to be accurate. I dropped into ATTI mode and remember seeing 53 mph and the log has me @ 53.47 mph. I'm just trying to figure out why it keeps truncating my flights and why is the "Last Seen" off by so much?
 
This thread doesn't make great reading for a prospective Flytrex Live buyer :(

My main reason for purchase was in case of flyaway and if it can't report it's live flights correctly, then what's the point?
Might as well stick with the TK102B tracker.
 
i didn't start this post to promote Flytrex Live. I bought it back in early July and just received it so decided to post ^_^

Flytrex Live would work better for you in UK/Europe than in US. UK's 2G support is way better than US.
 
If I can add my 4 cents:

I bought the Flytrex Live a month ago. Just received it 4 days ago, however. Nice ship time eh?

I installed the device in my Phantom 2 (non-vision). Everything hooked up correctly. Green lights all around. Using T-Mobile in an urban/sub-urban boundary. I.e., good coverage for 2G (so far). Sim card works, Flytrex Live (FTL) device has green lights, P2 works just fine.

Setup my profile on the Flytrex website. Attached the FTL to my account via the code on the device itself.

So I take it on her first flight with the new "black box" installed. I go maybe 20 feet away and about 40 feet up, max. After about five mins, my Flytrex profile says I've earned new badges. First badge = "welcome..." or something. Then there were a ton of other badges that turned my smile sideways. Among them was a "1k Diver" badge - which means I went down in altitude from my starting point, as recorded by the FTL. "How much lower?" you ask? It says I descended at least 1000 feet from my starting altitude. WTF? A number of other badges appeared too. They included things like going 1000' UP from my starting point. Again, keep in mind I never went 50 feet high and less than 50 feet away.

I downloaded the CSV file from my flight and plugged it into Dashware. According to the flight data, my P2 did things during my "blinks" (that's where you close and open your eyes rapidly to main moisture) I didn't think were possible - only to return to the same point where it was before I blinked. In other words, the flight data transmitted from the FTL is pure BS.

Some calculation in this thing is WAAAAYYYY OFF. It has nothing to do with 2G, in my opinion. It is simply "capturing" the data from the GPS as it goes into the main flight controller. It's what's inside the FTL that's all screwed up. So much for quality control. And if for some reason the data gets screwed up during the transmission or within the infrastructure of T-Mobile, I'd be surprised. It sure would be the cleanest scramble of data I've seen. Looking at the contents of the CSV export tells me everything seems pretty aligned. It's the math from the FTL that's pumping out bad (ahem...REALLY bad) info.

If only I would have just stuck with purchasing the Core 2. Serves me right for buying something when it's first released.

Sincerely,

Pissed off Flytrex Live buyer
 
If you want to consolidate the threads, I'd be happy with just one. Otherwise, the word needs to get out that this thing is junk, in my opinion/experience.
 
Update (8/28/2014):

Previous post - viewtopic.php?f=27&t=23263&start=30#p220309

So dissatisfied with the way the FLT was "working" I was going to try anything. So I ripped it out from its casing (gently) and placed it within the body of my P2. Now, all the data seems to be pretty accurate, except for the data logged before takeoff - which has the bird going 3 to 5 feet all over the place (side to side, back and forth - not related to vertical). So I simply uncased it, repositioned the FLT, and now it's behaving as I would expect, for the most part. Strange eh? One thing I did check before repositioning was whether the barometer was covered - and it wasn't - it had a wide opening/full opening. A simple reposition of the device made it work. I almost don't care what caused the original bad-data, now that it's working. Whew....didn't want to go through an RMA process. Here's what it looks like now using Dashware: http://youtu.be/7vKp2zCVUXE
 
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