Most missions I fly are used for orthophoto generation. As a result a typical flight will consist of multiple parallel flight lines with equispaced photos along each line (normally 60 or so in all)
I use a VBA application that I wrote to generate the Litchi flight plan as a CSV file which I upload via Mission Planner and this works well - until I decide that my photo spacing needs to be reduced. This means regenerating the whole thing again. Also with Litchi, when you take a photo at a waypoint it pauses a significant period at the waypoint before taking the photo, presumably to avoid ground smear in the resultant image.
In my case, at the altitude I fly (100m) and speed (10km/hour), ground smear is only a problem when shutter speed drops below about 1/200th second.
So I have been experimenting with using interval timed photos along a path which has only the end points of each flight line without intermediate points.
This works well in a semi automatic way - set the camera to interval timer mode (say 3 seconds), wait until the aircraft reaches the start of the first flight line, press the onscreen shutter button, wait until the end of the line, press again to stop the timer, wait until the start of the second line, press the shutter again to restart the timer and so on.
What I haven't been able to figure out is how to start/stop the interval timer automatically. I would have expected that when interval timer mode is set, the Take a photo action in the action list for a waypoint would start the interval time and subsequent Take a photo actions would toggle the timer.
This doesn't appear to be the case - from what I observed, even in Interval Timer mode, Take a Photo still takes a single photo just as it does when the camera is in single shot mode.
Does anyone know of any way to start/stop the interval timer automatically? I suspect this isn't possible but it seems an oversight that it is not.
I use a VBA application that I wrote to generate the Litchi flight plan as a CSV file which I upload via Mission Planner and this works well - until I decide that my photo spacing needs to be reduced. This means regenerating the whole thing again. Also with Litchi, when you take a photo at a waypoint it pauses a significant period at the waypoint before taking the photo, presumably to avoid ground smear in the resultant image.
In my case, at the altitude I fly (100m) and speed (10km/hour), ground smear is only a problem when shutter speed drops below about 1/200th second.
So I have been experimenting with using interval timed photos along a path which has only the end points of each flight line without intermediate points.
This works well in a semi automatic way - set the camera to interval timer mode (say 3 seconds), wait until the aircraft reaches the start of the first flight line, press the onscreen shutter button, wait until the end of the line, press again to stop the timer, wait until the start of the second line, press the shutter again to restart the timer and so on.
What I haven't been able to figure out is how to start/stop the interval timer automatically. I would have expected that when interval timer mode is set, the Take a photo action in the action list for a waypoint would start the interval time and subsequent Take a photo actions would toggle the timer.
This doesn't appear to be the case - from what I observed, even in Interval Timer mode, Take a Photo still takes a single photo just as it does when the camera is in single shot mode.
Does anyone know of any way to start/stop the interval timer automatically? I suspect this isn't possible but it seems an oversight that it is not.