I want to share my todays experience with Inspire 1. crash trying Follow me mode and I would appreciate comments from more experince pilots than me if I did anything wrong.
I have dowloaded latest firmware, made sure everything is updated before the flight.
I did the IMU calibration after the update.
I did calibrate the compass as I do always do before each flight.
I had green go before taking off and enough satelites.
My father was driving the car and was in passanger seat to make sure I can concetrate on operating the Inspire.
I did little test run in the fields which was ok and seems to work as it suppose to do.
Then I took it for longer ride on the road which was not so busy.
From the beginning it seems to be fine, but I was surprise that it actually show you the distance from HP and not from the actual point where I was while traveling, but ok whatever, maybe there is a reason for that Iam not aware of.
I did change a few times the following mode to adjust the seen I want to capture, but I felt weird when I brought up the Inspire to 100m, but actually it seems it was like only 20meters in hight...hmmm, I tried to bring him up manualy since I was worry about the trees along the way.
To make long story short on the end while we were driving approximetly at 30% of battery it decided to tell me its landing, ok....and yes it started, I jump out of the car and canceled the landing, realizing it would be fine since it was landing on empty field. Ok Iam thinking that I manualy bring him closer and land him. I had the Inspire few meters away and about 2 meters in the hight. Sudenlly another surprise, Inspire decided to go home...ouch...why???? Sure it did, but instead claming up and go home it decided to go straight into the bushes in fron of him, before I did react of course.....ouch again.
The question I have, how is this possible, did I do anything wrong?
Friend of mine trying this feature which I did personally witness with Phantom 3 had similiar experince ending in the tree and crashing.
I do admit Iam not very experince pilot and Iam learning but I did enough flights to know to be very carefull.
Here is the video, no need to watch it all, but look at 11minute mark and maybe you can tell mo more.
Thanks
Michal
There is a setting where it gives you a warning that the battery is going low and it is going to land.
There is also another setting, that if the battery gets critically low, it will do an automatic Return To Home and Land. I have not tested this on the current firmware, but on older firmware, it was not able to be cancelled once the function began. (I believe its 5% or 10%) I made sure that settings was OFF.
Did it give you the option to cancel automatic RTH?
Looks like the height was not correct either, so the Inspire THOUGHT it was high up to your RTH altititude settings but instead was lower than that. I am not sure what your RTH altitude was but I usually make it higher than my approximation to the height of nearby trees.
I have had the altitude meter inaccurate on a Phantom 3, but it was about 10~20 meters off.
Lets say the user launched from elevation "zero" then drove a few miles on a mountain pass and found themselves at the max RTH elevation (stock 120m / upto 500m). The drone would then vertically crash into whatever it came across on a RTH depending on this pretty likely scenario for most users.
Lesson - if you are using follow me while driving your car - and you notice that you are going up a hill / mountain / etc then your RTH will be all screwed up if you let your battery go down low.
Solution - Would need the drone and the remote to constantly monitor elevation inclines / declines for follow me on ANY DJI unit to be more failsafe.
I found the setting where you can adjust percentage of critical battery warnings and low battery warning, I did not find where you can actually turn off option or modify what the Inspire supposed to do when its reach these values.
By default critical battery warning is 10% and Low battery warning is 30%
Of course that was the first thing I did was to cancel the RTH, but he thought that for some reason is in 70meters and actually was about 2m and the Failsafe mode was set up up to 20m, so he went straight down to bushes....and he was actually faster than my fingers on my iPad.
I can understand of the logic of this behavior, but what I don't understand is why he came up with this hight? And probably it happened during the flight, because just before it happened while we were driving he was giving me hight of 100meters above me, I got scared and manually taking him higher and he was just about the hight of the trees....cca 20-30m.
What I don't understand is, why by default there are setting like that especially in modes like this? So if I happened to be on the boat to try this feature it would just land on the water or it would go to some point on the ocean and land.....Glad I did not try this.
Perhaps I missed something, but again it was one of my first try using this feature and let me tell you it did not give me safe feeling at all.
Yeah tell me about it
I believe I choose Hover in place, what would be the point to return where you started right?
No obviously Home is not the remote, that what I thought also, but I realize soon while driving that the distance showing is more than 1000m and had Inspire following me in 20meters
Preclude: - Always remember: the altitude shown is over your starting point NOT over ground, the plane has no idea how high above the ground it is
The right reaction latest when the plane reached the yellow H on the yellow line would have been to set the homepoint to the RC position. This would have avoided all trouble.
What happened:
1. Passing this point the plane realized it will not be able to return home but was still in Follow me mode so
2. it decided to land
3. you cancelled this - are you sure your low battery warning is not set to 35% ? -
4. it again started return home few seconds after it reached 35%
5. you did not cancel this but you should have seen a 10 seconds warning again - assuming that YOU did not press the rth button yourself
6. You say your rth is set to 20m - as it was at 76m it just went home..............at 76m alt over your STARTING POINT
PS: You are not alone I guess 50% of people damage or destroy their drone in the first weeks after buying. I would recommend to anyone if anything happens which seems odd to you like you think it should fly 100m high but you see its only just over the trees just land it immediately and RESEARCH THIS BEHAVIOUR first before continuing.
If you would not have crashed it this time you would have done so next time just flying into a hill, some trees or a building because misunderstanding how the plane calculates the alt shown to you means you cannot set a correct rth altitude or even alt limit.
I bet you have set the alt limit also to 120m standard?
So next thing what would have happened is your car gone 50m higher and your high alt limit set to 120m the screen would have told you a friendly max alt reached and your plane crashed into the ground - because your car climbed 120m over your starting point and for the drone this means 120m = ZERO. You could not have reacted fast enough to change this limit. So maybe its a good idea to review your settings now and set them more matching to your flying location.
Hover in place would be where the aircraft is at the time. So at the set battery level, the aircraft would stop and hover. Return to the origin point would be the "home" location setting.
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