Three Q's about Drone Deploy....

[Seaeagle]

I also use Autocad to digitise my images but would never use it to plan my flight mission as there are too many mistakes that can be made. I use drone Drone deploy on my desktop to plan my flights prior to going into the field as you have the option to minimise shots, allow for a second battery install, and also have the ability to allow for crosswinds (albeit this bit has to be done in the field if required).
Three key points that I have learnt are: 1. Always launch the drone prior to the mission to ascertain the height of the highest structure/tree, and reset the mission height to clear all of these obstacles. 2. always have the controller toggle switched to 'F' and not 'P' for take off. 3. When returning to base I always toggle back to 'P' at about 15 metres above the ground so that I can control the decent. Depending on the surrounds, I find that an altitude of around 40-50 metres provides the best detail for my purposes. I also use Maps Made Easy as I like the way they structure the payments - as in pay as you go, and I find that even with the lowest payment option I get my images back within a few hours.

Hope all this helps

 

[Ansia]

I also use Autocad to digitise my images but would never use it to plan my flight mission as there are too many mistakes that can be made. I use drone Drone deploy on my desktop to plan my flights prior to going into the field as you have the option to minimise shots, allow for a second battery install, and also have the ability to allow for crosswinds (albeit this bit has to be done in the field if required).
Three key points that I have learnt are: 1. Always launch the drone prior to the mission to ascertain the height of the highest structure/tree, and reset the mission height to clear all of these obstacles. 2. always have the controller toggle switched to 'F' and not 'P' for take off. 3. When returning to base I always toggle back to 'P' at about 15 metres above the ground so that I can control the decent. Depending on the surrounds, I find that an altitude of around 40-50 metres provides the best detail for my purposes. I also use Maps Made Easy as I like the way they structure the payments - as in pay as you go, and I find that even with the lowest payment option I get my images back within a few hours.

Hope all this helps

How long do they take to return you the 3D rendering?

 

[Seaeagle]

Usually around 4 hours, I have found that uploading them on a weekend is usually the quickest - woops maybe I shouldn't have said that

 

[Ansia]

Usually around 4 hours, I have found that uploading them on a weekend is usually the quickest - woops maybe I shouldn't have said that

Can you retrieve it as a TIN in KML format?

 

[Seaeagle]

Unfortunately I don't think so, - I usually get .tif, .jpg. kmz, *COLOR.jpg and DEM.tif, which for what I do is fine. One thing that does annoy me and I'm not sure what causes it and whether its a MapsMade Easy thing, is that items that have a significant height, such as buildings and trees have what looks like fluffy edges

 

[Bigriver]

Many of my projects are flown at 250' altitude, yielding 0.8 inch GSD. Larger projects i will bump it up to 400' altitude (US maximum) with 1.3 inch GSD. These are based on using P4P. This seems to be high enough resolution for my mapping. Pix4D on desktop is my mapping software with similar processing times as Meta4. Larger projects may take 4 or 5 hours of actual processing (not counting cleaning point clouds, orthomosaics, etc.). Good processing computer, but nothing exceptional.

Lindsaybev - I actually use Microstation for Litchi planning, not AutoCAD. Although it should produce similar results. As for determining offsets, just calculate the your camera's image width at a given height, and multiply by your desired offset (100-%). For example a P4P at 250' alt. the image width is 384 feet. If you want 75% overlap, your paths would be 96 feet apart. You could try dragging waypoints in Litchi to the desired offset, but this gets quite tedious, and I know because I've struggled through it. But I still suggest that you test out all the available mapping apps that are out there and see if they fit your needs.

 

[GeneM]

I have found DroneDeploy to be the most cost effective solution for creating large area maps and 3D models. I have mapped areas as large as 1200 acres in a day. My clients (oil & gas and heavy industry) usually use the ortho map outputs for documentation, and we use the 3D outputs to combine with engineering files to create project visualizations and interactive walk-thrus.

For the OP, you do not need to use DroneDeploys app to fly the mission. You can fly the mission with any flight control app and upload the images to a DroneDeploy project to process. I personally prefer to fly using the DJI GS Pro app for most missions. MapsMadeEasy and the DroneDeploy app are my next two, in order. Precision Hawk made a great app but it quit working a few firmware versions ago and I haven’t tried it lately.

Here are my best practices. I would love to know what others who map large areas have found works for them.

For large areas, I break up the area into individual 300 acre flight plans. Nothing worse than being 6 batteries into a flight and having the app crash or losing the connection and not being able to continue. Allow at least one leg of overlap between flight plan areas. Better to capture a few hundred feet outside the area you need than to cut off 10 feet of what you do need.

Before the flight, in the DJI Go app, I set white balance to Sunny, and set my exposure and leave it in manual. I do not let the flight control apps control the camera settings. After setting the camera, close DJI Go and open your preferred flight app.

For most purposes, I set flight altitude at 250 feet, front overlap at 80% and side overlap at 75%. I use a simple app called WindCompass to see the wind direction and rotate my flight plan to fly across the wind rather than into it. If possible, start on the upwind side of your area and the wind will help push you to the next leg at each turn. You can map in 20 mph winds this way, but make sure you can walk down the side of your flight plan because you will have to land when the battery gets low- the drone will NOT return to home against high winds. Don’t forget to set the action the drone takes at the end of the flight plan- usually return to home or hover.

DO NOT let your drone auto-takeoff or land. It can tip over in windy conditions because the flight apps take off slowly. I always use a 2ft x 4ft folding table to take off and land on. Manually activate the motors and pop the drone up to 10 feet. Check all controls- left, right, up, down, rotate left and right, and camera pivot. Once your controls checks are done, upload your mission from your mapping app to your hovering drone then start the mission.

Watch your battery levels as you fly. Watch and remember the percentage of battery it takes to fly each leg of your flight plan. Most mapping software autopilots will resume at the beginning of a flight leg and NOT in the middle. Stop your flight at the beginning of a leg to change batteries. Every three batteries or after about an hour of flight, I let the drone sit for about 10 minutes to cool the motors a little. I also change out the microSD card with a new one. Better a card fail or be corrupted with a few hundred images than an entire days worth of images.

Check your props every hour for any nicks. Crazy as it sound, a “bug strike” can chip a fast spinning prop. If I see ANY damage to a prop, I replace all four. I don’t use old and new props. Don’t forget to check your hubs for wear as well. The little plastic locks will also wear down.

Always manually land your drone. It isn’t worth the risk of the drone turning over letting it auto land.

My primary mapping Phantom 4 has over 100 flight hours and 600 miles of incident free flight. It is like changing the oil in your car, if you take care of it, it will take care of you.

Hope this helps some new to mapping. I’d love to get some feedback if someone thinks there is something else I can do to that will improve my results or reliability of my drones.

Hoping to do some flights with the Phantom 4 RTK soon and can report my results.

Safe flying.

 

[Lindsaybev]

I'm nowhere near that. I usually do 10-20 acres, but I fly at the lowest altitude possible to get better resolution on my photos.

Ansia...what AGL do you fly at?? I really needed to see the ground as well as possible in this "map. I flew at 130 ' altitiude, and the bird flew it at approx. 6 mph. I increased overlap to about 85/80...and I think it looks terrible. I was so excited to get it back home and upload the photos....and then I got this later tonight. The resolution is terrible, and the distance seems very far off compared to the altitude.

Should I be making larger overlaps? Should I fly lower???? (It looks REALLY far away compared to the videos I take in Litchi, at greater altitudes!) Can I force it fly slower by changing the top speed setting? Should I work on manual camera settings???

Help from anyone would be appreciated....

 

[Lindsaybev]

Many of my projects are flown at 250' altitude, yielding 0.8 inch GSD. Larger projects i will bump it up to 400' altitude (US maximum) with 1.3 inch GSD. These are based on using P4P. This seems to be high enough resolution for my mapping. Pix4D on desktop is my mapping software with similar processing times as Meta4. Larger projects may take 4 or 5 hours of actual processing (not counting cleaning point clouds, orthomosaics, etc.). Good processing computer, but nothing exceptional.

Lindsaybev - I actually use Microstation for Litchi planning, not AutoCAD. Although it should produce similar results. As for determining offsets, just calculate the your camera's image width at a given height, and multiply by your desired offset (100-%). For example a P4P at 250' alt. the image width is 384 feet. If you want 75% overlap, your paths would be 96 feet apart. You could try dragging waypoints in Litchi to the desired offset, but this gets quite tedious, and I know because I've struggled through it. But I still suggest that you test out all the available mapping apps that are out there and see if they fit your needs.

Thank you for your thoughtful answer! Very helpful. What cooridinate system do you use in your CAD program?

 

[Lindsaybev]

I have found DroneDeploy to be the most cost effective solution for creating large area maps and 3D models. I have mapped areas as large as 1200 acres in a day. My clients (oil & gas and heavy industry) usually use the ortho map outputs for documentation, and we use the 3D outputs to combine with engineering files to create project visualizations and interactive walk-thrus.

For the OP, you do not need to use DroneDeploys app to fly the mission. You can fly the mission with any flight control app and upload the images to a DroneDeploy project to process. I personally prefer to fly using the DJI GS Pro app for most missions. MapsMadeEasy and the DroneDeploy app are my next two, in order. Precision Hawk made a great app but it quit working a few firmware versions ago and I haven’t tried it lately.

Here are my best practices. I would love to know what others who map large areas have found works for them.

For large areas, I break up the area into individual 300 acre flight plans. Nothing worse than being 6 batteries into a flight and having the app crash or losing the connection and not being able to continue. Allow at least one leg of overlap between flight plan areas. Better to capture a few hundred feet outside the area you need than to cut off 10 feet of what you do need.

Before the flight, in the DJI Go app, I set white balance to Sunny, and set my exposure and leave it in manual. I do not let the flight control apps control the camera settings. After setting the camera, close DJI Go and open your preferred flight app.

For most purposes, I set flight altitude at 250 feet, front overlap at 80% and side overlap at 75%. I use a simple app called WindCompass to see the wind direction and rotate my flight plan to fly across the wind rather than into it. If possible, start on the upwind side of your area and the wind will help push you to the next leg at each turn. You can map in 20 mph winds this way, but make sure you can walk down the side of your flight plan because you will have to land when the battery gets low- the drone will NOT return to home against high winds. Don’t forget to set the action the drone takes at the end of the flight plan- usually return to home or hover.

DO NOT let your drone auto-takeoff or land. It can tip over in windy conditions because the flight apps take off slowly. I always use a 2ft x 4ft folding table to take off and land on. Manually activate the motors and pop the drone up to 10 feet. Check all controls- left, right, up, down, rotate left and right, and camera pivot. Once your controls checks are done, upload your mission from your mapping app to your hovering drone then start the mission.

Watch your battery levels as you fly. Watch and remember the percentage of battery it takes to fly each leg of your flight plan. Most mapping software autopilots will resume at the beginning of a flight leg and NOT in the middle. Stop your flight at the beginning of a leg to change batteries. Every three batteries or after about an hour of flight, I let the drone sit for about 10 minutes to cool the motors a little. I also change out the microSD card with a new one. Better a card fail or be corrupted with a few hundred images than an entire days worth of images.

Check your props every hour for any nicks. Crazy as it sound, a “bug strike” can chip a fast spinning prop. If I see ANY damage to a prop, I replace all four. I don’t use old and new props. Don’t forget to check your hubs for wear as well. The little plastic locks will also wear down.

Always manually land your drone. It isn’t worth the risk of the drone turning over letting it auto land.

My primary mapping Phantom 4 has over 100 flight hours and 600 miles of incident free flight. It is like changing the oil in your car, if you take care of it, it will take care of you.

Hope this helps some new to mapping. I’d love to get some feedback if someone thinks there is something else I can do to that will improve my results or reliability of my drones.

Hoping to do some flights with the Phantom 4 RTK soon and can report my results.

Safe flying.

Great Advice! Thank you. Mabe you can take a look at my prior post, with my first map over a creek area. I want to fly as closely as I can to get the best resolution. But some Digger Pines preclude me from going lower than about 115 ' AGL. Any help would be very much appreciated. Videos I have taken in Litchi look MUCH better than this at higher altitudes, and I am confused as to why.

 

[Ansia]

Ansia...what AGL do you fly at?? I really needed to see the ground as well as possible in this "map. I flew at 130 ' altitiude, and the bird flew it at approx. 6 mph. I increased overlap to about 85/80...and I think it looks terrible. I was so excited to get it back home and upload the photos....and then I got this later tonight. The resolution is terrible, and the distance seems very far off compared to the altitude.

Should I be making larger overlaps? Should I fly lower???? (It looks REALLY far away compared to the videos I take in Litchi, at greater altitudes!) Can I force it fly slower by changing the top speed setting? Should I work on manual camera settings???

Help from anyone would be appreciated....View attachment 108669

This video is talking about the RTK, but after halfway into the video he explains about creating a mission and the best settings to do it. Hope it helps.

Can you send me the photos and see if I can do better with them? It will take me a week to process them fully but I want to see what I get compared to yours.

 

[Lindsaybev]

This video is talking about the RTK, but after halfway into the video he explains about creating a mission and the best settings to do it. Hope it helps.

Can you send me the photos and see if I can do better with them? It will take me a week to process them fully but I want to see what I get compared to yours.

Ansia! Sweet offer. Thank you so very much. However, I AM a FOOL! I don't know why I did not figure this out immediately. But this was simply the download from DroneDeploy, a small JPG. The "real thing" was actually quite phenomenal! I saw the real image on Drone Deploy; plus I stiched my own in MS ICE. Both look terrific.

I am still going to watch the video. It seemed a little over-exposed, but I did fly in the high noon sun. Due to the February sun, the shadows were a bit difficult, as well. I would attach the file here, but it is obviously too large. But I was very happy with it, as were the clients.

But your cheerful willingness to help out is very much appreciated. I was stressed for a minute....

 

[jbuy41]

Drone Deploy is will no longer be free. Anyone got a free replacement.? I seldom need the software but was great when I needed it.

 

[Ansia]

Drone Deploy is will no longer be free. Anyone got a free replacement.? I seldom need the software but was great when I needed it.

Pix4D

 

[jbuy41]

thanks

 

[Meta4]

Drone Deploy is will no longer be free. Anyone got a free replacement.? I seldom need the software but was great when I needed it.

DroneDeploy is still free to fly with.
You only pay if you use their processing.

 

[PeteM]

but after halfway into the video he explains about creating a mission and the best settings to do it. Hope it helps.

In all these "commercial" tutorials you can see how simple it is to create a flight mission simply by drawing a perimeter on an app. The problem is that in real life the territory is not only made up of perfectly horizontal plains with freshly cut grass or large parking lots. All those "tap & fly" solutions give bad results (when they do not risk crashing your drone) as soon as they have to deal with irregular and complex orography.

Drone Deploy, Pix4D or other similar apps are perfect if your flights are simple... otherwise the advice is to draw the flight mission manually and then load it on Litchi.

 

[Lindsaybev]

In all these "commercial" tutorials you can see how simple it is to create a flight mission simply by drawing a perimeter on an app. The problem is that in real life the territory is not only made up of perfectly horizontal plains with freshly cut grass or large parking lots. All those "tap & fly" solutions give bad results (when they do not risk crashing your drone) as soon as they have to deal with irregular and complex orography.

Drone Deploy, Pix4D or other similar apps are perfect if your flights are simple... otherwise the advice is to draw the flight mission manually and then load it on Litchi.

That had been my original intent. But I was unsure about the overlap and the elevation parameters. How do you plan your mapping mission so that you get the correct overlap for the elevation?

It just seemed a lot easier to plan it in DD. But I would still be intereted in knowing your workflow....

 

[PeteM]

Mission Planner is an open source software that, starting from the optical parameters of your camera, allows you to draw missions following the real ground (if you have, you can also upload a DTM of the zone).

 

[Lindsaybev]

Mission Planner is an open source software that, starting from the optical parameters of your camera, allows you to draw missions following the real ground (if you have, you can also upload a DTM of the zone).

Yes, I use Mission Hub. Love it. Would I be incorrect in assuming that if I am 100 feet up in elevation that I will get approx. 75 feet of view in the lens....and then use this to figure a 75 percent overlap?? (Assuming 4:3 aspect ratio??)