Litchi TIP: Use Home Lock to set up Orbit

[dwallersv]

I may be sharing something obvious, or discussed before, but this was a "discovery" of mine that might help others, so here it is.

We're selling our home in the next year, and I'm messing around with getting a good orbit of the house for marketing. We live in a hilly, somewhat rural-ish locale with trees and other obstacles in the air. Figuring out the best altitude and radius for the AC is not simple in these circumstances.

One way to work this all out is to simply program an orbit, let it run, see what it looks like, adjust, run some more, iterate on this process. That's a workable method, but what I found lacking is control over the AC to look around by changing heading, full control over the movement of the AC, radius, etc.

Home Lock provides an exceptional way to put yourself into "manual orbit" mode, so you can fly the orbit while looking to see clearance from objects, see the view of the POI, adjust the radius, altitude, etc. while hovering looking at an obstacle, etc.

You can fly around the POI in an orbit again an again adjusting all these parameters to get the view you want, clear obstacles with minimum necessary clearance, etc. Once you have nailed your orbit, the radius and altitude are right there on the screen in the telemetry -- just set up the actual orbit with these parameters, and run it.

It's so much easier getting it set up this way.

 

[smiller]

I'm confused... I thought home lock only allowed movement directly to/from the home point. How do you orbit while in home lock mode?

 

[dwallersv]

In home lock using roll left/right will orbit around the home point at a fixed distance, independent of heading. So, you can control movement around the circle CW or CCW by using the right stick (Mode 2) left/right to move around the circle.

Using the pitch control (right stick up/down) to control the radius of the circle.

In all cases, you can independently control the heading -- i.e. where the camera is looking -- with the yaw control of the left stick (left/right). You can control altitude as usual with up/down of the left stick.

So, how do you use this to set up an orbit in a complicated environment? Place the AC at the focus POI (ignoring altitude). Set the home point there. Be aware of the impact of this on RTH!! Anyway, once done, fly the AC out to a candidate radius and altitude from the HP. Once there, activate Home Lock.

Now, at your discretion, use the right stick roll action to fly the AC around the circle. So long as you do not give any pitch input, the AC will fly the circular course around the HP. You can control the heading arbitrarily, looking directly ahead to avoid trees, adjust the radius of the circle to fly in front or behind an obstacle relative to the POI, adjust altitude to just clear something by 20 feet or so, etc.

As usual with manual flight, any time you release the sticks it stops and hovers in place. So, this simply gives you the ability to constrain the course to a circle around a fixed point, while being free to look anywhere with the camera, control movement on the course, and adjust the course as needed to dial it in.

 

[With The Birds]

Yep, that will work- nice tip. If you haven't tried it yet you will also find that orbits are a relatively easy move in normal flight also. Simply fly to your desired distance from the POi and pitch in the desired orbit direction. All you need to do then is feed in some yaw to keep the POi centred in frame.

 

[dwallersv]

Yep, that will work- nice tip. If you haven't tried it yet you will also find that orbits are a relatively easy move in normal flight also. Simply fly to your desired distance from the POi and pitch in the desired orbit direction. All you need to do then is feed in some yaw to keep the POi centred in frame.

Yes, but my control simply is not good enough to get the footage as uniform and smooth keep the POI positioned in the frame. I'm not too bad, but Litchi is near perfect running the orbit.

The benefit of the "manual" orbit run via Home Lock to set it up isn't nearly as obvious -- "aha!" type moment -- until you try to set one up in an airspace-complex environment: Trees, hilly uneven terrain, power lines, etc. In this case, you need to carefully fly the orbit while NOT looking at the POI, but rather all around as you move through it, to adjust radius/altutude to get clearance.

I honed this method getting the orbit for my house set up, and it slips between two trees on one point. Never would have been able to get it set up this way (with PERFECT footage!) trying to tune it through the Orbit feature itself. I would have certainly crashed.

The one problem with this method is it's based on the Home Point, which you really don't want to reset away from a clear, safe place on the ground to RTH to. By resetting it to the POI of interest (necessary for this Orbit setup procedure), it may be somewhere you DON'T want the bird to land if RTH gets triggered.

So, it would be nice if Litchi added a pretty easy enhancement to allow for complete manual control during an Orbit to set it up. I'm going to email the developer.