RIP Flytrex Live

Brent10 · Aug 23, 2017

The Flytrex Live service died today.

I have one on my Phantom 2 as well as my Phantom 3 that I was still using.
Now they are bricks.

Jiggly-Wiggly · Aug 23, 2017

Kinda sucks but it was sorta inevitable. GO app for P3 Pro and later models was really good since it showed live tracking on Google Maps satellite view, and this pretty much eliminated the major appeal for Flytrex Live 3G. Although Live 3G had the added benefit of showing you the GPS location of a downed bird, this function can be accomplished with cheaper alternatives like the Trackimo device (what I have installed on my bird).

RIP, Flytrex Live --- you were a great innovation for live drone tracking --- but all good things come to pass

happydays · Aug 24, 2017

Wow. I remember everyone rushing out to get Flytrex systems for their P2s back a few years ago. The beauty then was that if the phantom did a flyaway and went out of range that Flytrex still would continue to register the location. Not sure how the Go app replaced this if the craft went out of range and RTH failed, for example? Or if the home point hadn't been set correctly and it RTH'd to the last known location?

Jiggly-Wiggly · Aug 24, 2017

happydays said:
Wow. I remember everyone rushing out to get Flytrex systems for their P2s back a few years ago. The beauty then was that if the phantom did a flyaway and went out of range that Flytrex still would continue to register the location. Not sure how the Go app replaced this if the craft went out of range and RTH failed, for example? Or if the home point hadn't been set correctly and it RTH'd to the last known location?

It's true that Flytrex Live 3G would track location beyond what the GO app can do --- but as long as you have signal with the controller then the GO app live map tracking is just as good as anything Live 3G was offering. Plus, for those "soiled diaper" moments when you go out of range and lose signal and the drone never returns home, you can use cheaper devices like the Trackimo or Marco Polo to find a lost bird.

happydays · Aug 24, 2017

Jiggly-Wiggly said:
as long as you have signal with the controller

This was not usually the case with phantoms pre-3 though as the range was fairly limited. Rather often, the phantom would 'do a flyaway' and go beyond controller range. It would keep flying until the battery ran out, by which time it was way beyond the controller range and therefore the Pilot App ( as it was then) would be useless in finding it because as soon as it went out of range, the find my phantom bit stopped recording the location.

Also, most flyaways (I had a few too) were found to be as a result of the pilot not registering the home point correctly (which is why Go now says 'The home point has been set, please check it on the map'). In fact the phantom 1 used to rely on a sequence of flashing lights to tell you that the home point had been set (there was no app or FPV in those days). Problem was that the manual didn't tell you that the craft went through two sets of the same sequence to set the home point; the first was to acknowledge that the direction had been set, the second to record the home point. Many pilots took off completely ignorant of the fact that the home point was not recorded. The phantom would then fly away rather rapidly back to where it thought the home point was from the last flight location. Most pilots believed that this was a flyaway.

Oh Phantom 1s. Happy days indeed. You guys don't know how lucky you are that the 3 and 4s are so easy to fly!

Brent10 · Aug 24, 2017

Yeah, the writing was on the wall:

They never added the promised data fields that were missing from the Flytrex Live Plus (for the Phantom 3),
They never fixed the many bugs and unfinished features of their Flytrex Live user portal website,
It was obvious that their main focus had shifted to developing a drone delivery system,
And as the Flytrex compatible multirotors became long in the tooth the user base no doubt began to dwindle (I noticed a sharp decline in the number of real-time flights on the Flytrex Live Map. In fact, most of the times I checked it I saw NO live flights.)

BUT, Flytrex could have at least had the courtesy to notify users that they planned to shut down the service. If for no other reason than to give us the opportunity to download our flight data if desired. Instead, they chose to kill it all without so much as a peep.

nvpowerdoc · Aug 25, 2017

Wow, this is crazy! Just started looking into using the Flytrex Core 2 again (been out of the loop for a while). Been doing a web search to see if any developers out there decoded the Core 2 .FPV data file. Most stuff I find is back from 2014. Be nice to have their "decoder ring", LOL.

Jiggly-Wiggly · Aug 26, 2017

Brent10 said:
Yeah, the writing was on the wall:

They never added the promised data fields that were missing from the Flytrex Live Plus (for the Phantom 3),

They never fixed the many bugs and unfinished features of their Flytrex Live user portal website,

It was obvious that their main focus had shifted to developing a drone delivery system,

And as the Flytrex compatible multirotors became long in the tooth the user base no doubt began to dwindle (I noticed a sharp decline in the number of real-time flights on the Flytrex Live Map. In fact, most of the times I checked it I saw NO live flights.)

BUT, Flytrex could have at least had the courtesy to notify users that they planned to shut down the service. If for no other reason than to give us the opportunity to download our flight data if desired. Instead, they chose to kill it all without so much as a peep.

Sorta perplexing since the Flytrex Drone Delivery idea seems like a small niche product and too expensive for the average consumer. Right now they appear to be leasing the delivery drone at 80 cents per mile of flight, so you can't even buy the drone outright.

Gut feeling tells me drones capable of being controlled over LTE cellular networks is right around the corner, which means live tracking is built in and products like Flytrex Live are obsolete. Mainly for business use, I can't see delivery drones ever becoming popular unless they can be controlled over the cellular networks.

culnara · Sep 2, 2017

Aye, I am feking raging, I have two Live 3g Plus boxes and all were being used, I loved the technology side and the website for checking / recording your flights and marking them on the globe, end of January my P2v+ stopped working, sent multiple emails with no response, then at the end of March, My P3P ceased to track, same again no support or explanation was received, Just a month ago I finally got it sorted my self and I was so happy with my achievement, working flawlessly, the boxes I had paid a lot of money for were finally working again....then 3/4 weeks later, with so much as message - Bang, I'd just done a flight and noticed the ******* blue led again :O

ach I could go on, but these fuckers won't reinstate the servers coz they have deleted them, I mean, how much would it have cost to keep the servers running?

I hope they crash and burn with their delivery crap - as you may have guessed, I'm not happy!

FVP2350 · Sep 2, 2017

Class action Law Suit

anotherlab · Sep 2, 2017

FVP2350 said:
Class action Law Suit

What would you based the class action law suite on? You need to show defect or fraud against a group of people. I see no evidence that Flytrex did either.

Fytrec pivoted and pulled the plug for a product that probably was no longer generating enough income to warrant keep the service. It sucks for anyone who owns Flytrex hardware and Flytrex should have probably notified their users. That's not how you should handle the sunsetting of a service.

If there are enough Flytrex Live 3G users out there, you could get together and form a non-profit group to keep the service alive. The cost to run the service should be trivial. It's the support costs that Flytrex wanted to eliminate.

I have no idea how the Live 3G service works, but I'm assuming that the hardware sends a data packet to some server with the timestamp. location, and id of the drone. You would just need to control the DNS name that hardware is talking to. Perhaps that address can be even changed and you could run your own service. Worst case, it's hardcoded to something like "live3dlog.something.com". Then you just run a version of their code somewhere else, like AWS or Azure. Charge people a reasonable subscription to pay to keep the service running and open source the code. There's a fair amount of work to set this up, it would be easier to buy a different product.

Mark The Droner · Sep 3, 2017

Roughly two years ago, the CEO gave a talk about how he believed the skies should be mapped relative to the upcoming drone age. His mapping of recreational drone zones was basically all VLOS stuff, and very limited areas at that, leaving all the other areas for commercial use. In other words, if you want to fly, he wants you to go to some designated field somewhere. This contradicts what people were using the Live 3G devices for. At about this same time, the company stopped adding new drones to the Live 3G. For example, they never made one for the P3S, even while we could get one for the P3A/P. So the writing seemed to be on the wall. If they wanted to, they could have informed us they were going to start billing us a monthly fee, which I would have paid even without customer service. Hence they could have had an additional revenue stream with hardly any additional expense. But instead they just shut it all down. It was kind of expected to happen at some point. I am hoping somebody will step in and fill this need. The technology is there, so it's frustrating and surprising that nothing is available at the moment.

kirk2579 · Sep 3, 2017

happydays said:
This was not usually the case with phantoms pre-3 though as the range was fairly limited. Rather often, the phantom would 'do a flyaway' and go beyond controller range. It would keep flying until the battery ran out, by which time it was way beyond the controller range and therefore the Pilot App ( as it was then) would be useless in finding it because as soon as it went out of range, the find my phantom bit stopped recording the location.

Also, most flyaways (I had a few too) were found to be as a result of the pilot not registering the home point correctly (which is why Go now says 'The home point has been set, please check it on the map'). In fact the phantom 1 used to rely on a sequence of flashing lights to tell you that the home point had been set (there was no app or FPV in those days). Problem was that the manual didn't tell you that the craft went through two sets of the same sequence to set the home point; the first was to acknowledge that the direction had been set, the second to record the home point. Many pilots took off completely ignorant of the fact that the home point was not recorded. The phantom would then fly away rather rapidly back to where it thought the home point was from the last flight location. Most pilots believed that this was a flyaway.

Oh Phantom 1s. Happy days indeed. You guys don't know how lucky you are that the 3 and 4s are so easy to fly!

oh yea , that not knowing about waiting for the SECOND set of green lights cost me a few props on my first vision plus..

p fandango · Sep 4, 2017

i've got a Flytrex Live on my Phantom 2, & obviously annoyed at them shutting the server down. So will the Live not do anything without the server, will it not log the data & let you extract it like you can with a Core

kentM · Sep 5, 2017

Brent10 said:
The Flytrex Live service died today.

I have one on my Phantom 2 as well as my Phantom 3 that I was still using.
Now they are bricks.

This certainly appears to be true but I am surprised by the lack of "outrage" shown on their Facebook page from more than three or four folks. Has this service gone out world wide? I really suspected there would more concern. I think it would be important to make these comments on the Flytrex page where they are spending all their time blowing their horns about the delivery system. What will happen to those Icelanders when Flytrex decides to move on to something else? In the meantime, there is a gentleman here in North Texas who has reached out to Flytrex asking that the server for the US anyway, be moved to this area. However, as of this date he has received no reply from Amit at Flytrex.

Leave some comments on their Facebook page and see if we can recover this invaluable service

Happy motoring
Kent

Jiggly-Wiggly · Sep 6, 2017

kentM said:
In the meantime, there is a gentleman here in North Texas who has reached out to Flytrex asking that the server for the US anyway, be moved to this area. However, as of this date he has received no reply from Amit at Flytrex.

That was kinda the problem with Flytrex from the get go --- basing all their servers in Israel meant that Flytrex users in the U.S. were facing a certain amount of lag time even with signals moving at the speed of light through fiber optic cables and satellite transmissions. I had the Flytrex 2G mounted on my Phantom 2 Vision+ and it would frequently disconnect from the server in mid-flight. Very aggravating stuff, and a big reason I never bought the 3G version for my P3 Pro.

It shoudnt be that hard for a small startup to move a server to the U.S. and utilize the existing pay-as-you-go billing for a cheap SIM card to track the devices in real time. There still seems to be a consumer demand for real-time tracking of drones, and even good products like Trackimo cant do as good a good as a Flytrex 3G in a good coverage area.

TxRider7 · Sep 6, 2017

Well I can understand you guys being really upset but I am beside myself because I have purchased $$$ stock in the product for several years and been selling the units and still have many in stock and now most likely will be stuck with them !!

I have made several attempts to contact Flytrex and have offered to install a server here in the US and run it from our business just to keep the 1000's of pilots up and running but nothing !!....My main contact person had always been good in corresponding with us for any problems or updates but now it seems that they just don't give a rats about anything that relates to the Flytrex Live 3G product.

I will keep everyone posted if we can come to any agreements about providing a US server.

If any of you would like to send them an email and request them to please contact TxSat Electronics about moving the server, it might help....maybe !!!

Thanks guys !!

Ken Stovall

T x S a t E l e c t r o n i c s
317 East Kennedale Parkway, #1332
Kennedale, Texas 76060
817-689-8760
Email: kstovall@txsat.net
Web Site: www.txsat.net

culnara · Sep 7, 2017

TxRider7 said:
Well I can understand you guys being really upset but I am beside myself because I have purchased $$$ stock in the product for several years and been selling the units and still have many in stock and now most likely will be stuck with them !!

I have made several attempts to contact Flytrex and have offered to install a server here in the US and run it from our business just to keep the 1000's of pilots up and running but nothing !!....My main contact person had always been good in corresponding with us for any problems or updates but now it seems that they just don't give a rats about anything that relates to the Flytrex Live 3G product.

I will keep everyone posted if we can come to any agreements about providing a US server.

If any of you would like to send them an email and request them to please contact TxSat Electronics about moving the server, it might help....maybe !!!

Thanks guys !!

Ken Stovall

T x S a t E l e c t r o n i c s
317 East Kennedale Parkway, #1332
Kennedale, Texas 76060
817-689-8760
Email: kstovall@txsat.net
Web Site: www.txsat.net

Hi Tx

Jeezo I can see where you are coming from M8, I will mention you in my next message to flytrex, although they have seen my last message the have not replied (nothing new there then) probably something to do with the last message I sent them accompanied with my picture of my flytrex boxes on my multi-rotors
my question was simple and straight to the point "If you had paid over $500 to a company for equipment then a couple of years later that company did something that rendered the equipment unusable, what would you do?"
as I said, they have seen it but have yet to answer.....................

another of my m8's has started a facebook page, I've added a link to your fb page

not allowed to post link here

here's a picture of my dead weight plastic

here's hoping we can get something done about these clowns

FVP2350 · Sep 14, 2017

Flytrex coming back online
x.flytrex.com

Mark The Droner · Sep 14, 2017

Unbelievable! I am signed on! My data is intact! Does it actually work? I have already pulled all my devices. Dammit

I am trying to export my log now.

Edit: Got it! Log of 299 flights covering 20 months safely on my HD.

Now I will reinstall this Live 3G and see what's up!