Hello DJI Team
I am the owner of DJI Avata drone and I would like to post my product-related feedback here. This is my first drone, but I have a lot of experience with other hardware.
1. First of all, I was excited that USB-C is a standard for all DJI products (drone, controllers, Googles), however, I quickly realized that this is the worse USB-C implementation I have seen on the market. Just as a reference I am an IT specialist and I have been using headphones, phones, tablets, mouses, keyboards, USB drives/hubs, Microphones, USB-C Video, printers hardware, and a bunch of other USB-C capable hardware. And you know what? Most of this stuff "just works" out of the box, however, with DJI products I am experiencing a lot of issues:
1a. DJI FPV Controller fails to connect with MacBook Pro M1 2021 via USB-C to USB-C cable. The USB 2.0 hub is required to bypass this limitation. This is the first product that has this limitation and this is quite inconvenient.
1b. DJI Motion Controller is very picky when it comes to USB chargers. I thought it was broken - this controller can't be charged with many standard chargers including the official MacBook charger, OnePlus charger, direct usb-c to usb- conneciton to MacBook, and HyperJuice GaN 100W USB-C Charger - these chargers are charging ALL other devices just fine.
1c. What is the point of having a separate battery for Google 2? The USB standard is extremely flexible and this hardware should be able to work with any device that is USB Power Delivery Capable. There is no need to have a dedicated battery with the buttons and a dedicated custom power port - 2 USB-Cs in Googles would work just fine. MacBook is a greater example where we have 3/4 USB-C ports that support USB master/slave protocol. This includes a port that can either be used to charge MacBook or Charge an external device. And yes you can connect 4 chargers to Macbook at the same time and this will not break the device! Heaving all of the above could allow:
- Power Googles 2 from an external power bank or even a speaker like JBL Charge (that serves as a power bank)
- Connecting Googles 2 to MacBook via usb-c to usb-c as an external display (facilitate simulator applications). At the same time USB-C could be used to provide power to Googles (USB-C one way video and another way power deliver is a thing nowadays, so we could use Googlers with a single USB-C cable with the computer)
2. SD card max size - SD cards are quite popular nowadays, and sizes over 256GB are quite common. The 2TB is the currently max micro sd card available size on the market, introducing the 256 limitations is quite pointless. Sure 256GB may be enough for teh video, but I just personally had 512GB card and I was not able to try it out with the drone (seems like a pointless limitation).
3. Avata USB-C port location. This port is located in the worst possible place. This design is so terrible that it is hard to believe that this was released in the real product unless the intention was to break the propellers when accessing the port.
Good products, but most of the suffering the young age product issues.
I am hoping that most of these issues will be fixed by firmware upgrades. It would be good it DJI team would consider how to make these drones more compatible with the modern SB Ecosystem (not only a small subset of chargers and connection speeds/protocols).