#PIX4DMAPPER CAPTURE PROFESSIONAL#
Choose your drone: DJI Phantom 3 Professional.The first is the top left-hand corner of the home page of the APP. There are 2 areas that you can access the 'settings' of the APP. The following APP settings produced the results you will see hereafter. A little drone icon on the APP will show you where you are to help navigate to this center-point, thanks to the drone's GPS link to the APP. This is a relatively quick fix and just means that you have to fly your drone to within 150 meters from the center of the "X" on the mapping box. Per the manual:įly the drone manually and when it is less than 150 meters from the center of the grid, start the mission. While not entirely explicit in the APP instructions, there is an APP range limitation that requires your drone to be near the center-point of the map grid you've drawn. It took awhile to figure out what "this" was. The APP continued to give us a warning that it could not find the "Homepoint" and therefore would not be flying any mission until we resolved this. Standing in the same place (because the DJI product line has an operable range of 3.1 - 4.3 miles depending on your drone model and radio interference), we attempted to simply continue flying the next mission. Losing "Homepoint": Keep your drone close to the map bullseyeĪfter mapping an area in Grid Mission mode we reconfigured our mapping box on the APP to an area adjacent and just south of the original grid using the 3D friendly Double Grid Mission mode.
#PIX4DMAPPER CAPTURE ANDROID#
KML/KMZ imported outline: Android Only (to date) - hang in there, iOS is coming soon. This leads us into the world of "eye-balling" it with landmarks or perhaps taking a screen shot of your historical grid missions to ensure a repeat is accessible.
You would need to redraw - as best as you can remember - your old grid because the app doesn't save previous locations of where the grid was drawn, only the latest grid. Now say you had bad weather or wind gusts in the middle of your original mission and would like to fly that old mission over for better data or simply for the sake of nostalgia - because it was such a beautiful grid you so carefully made - you cannot. So while this particular mission is saved, if this mapping box needs to be leapfrogged over to map another adjacent area after a battery change, the user must manually redraw the new box, losing record of the old one. The way this is done is to draw a box on the Google Map that comes up around the area that is to be mapped. If a user would like to map an area larger than what the app indicates is possible, they would need to break that mission up into separate missions. The APP will calculate how long your drone can map based on the battery life and drone speed (which you can set on a slider to SLOW > FAST).Unfortunately, the iOS version does not import KML/KMZ files to date, which presents a notable problem: We also wanted to test both the "Grid Mission" and the "Double Grid Mission" mapping options available on the home screen of Pix4D Capture (APP) to discover how dense the point cloud and subsequent mesh would become with either of these options.