rod
Second Officer
New Zealand
Offline
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OK Ken, hide under the bushel if you will- I won't on your behalf.
Folks, here is an extensive reply that Ken gave me when enquiring about his new APP. Ken took a lot of trouble to give me the answers I needed and I include his entire reply out of general interest. But everyone should read para 2 if you have any doubt about his credentials..
Hi Rod,
Thanks for your interest and I’ll address your question in order.
(1) The Phantom only allows a single app to be connected to the Phantom at one time. If you wish to be able to switch back and forth between 2 apps you will need to close one fully before opening the second app to connect to the Phantom.
(2) I am a registered and approved level 2 app developer with DJI. Level 2 is the highest level of developer DJI has outside of corporation partners and the app is developed using the official DJI SDK. There are no hacks and nothing talking to the Phantom other than the official SDK.
(3) The app does not include any flight control; it is camera and camera control only and as such there is nothing this app can do that would result in a fly away. The same is true with the official DJI Vision app. In the Vision app you can enable Ground Station, which then allows you to pre-program a flight and send the Phantom on it’s way but that also would not result in a fly-away unless you made critical errors in choosing the flight path (like selecting a waypoint miles and miles away) in which case the fly-away wouldn’t really be the traditional fly-away, it would be plot error but even still the Vision app has checks to prevent even that level of pilot error. In short, neither this app nor the official DJI Vision app can cause a fly-away.
(3a) Since the app does not control the Phantom there is no reason a crash would result in any damage to the Phantom. In fact, you can turn your phone/table off completely or close the app and the Phantom would not notice and the only functionality you would lose would be the loss of camera control and video feed. As with the answer for #3 above, the same is true with the Vision app; you can turn it off and/or close it completely and all that would be lost if the control of the camera and video feed.
With regards to fly-away; while this app cannot result in a fly-away it might save you from missing something in pre-flight. Something the Vision app does not have is a pre-flight check. In the latest version of my app I added a pre-flight check that looks at a number of flight parameters when you turn on the motors. It will tell you if things look good/bad or in-between. The app reports when home point is missing or is far away (a common cause of a fly-away where pilots take off before home point is known). The pre-flight may not be perfect but it may help. It currently validates and reports on battery health, home point location and distance, satellite count, MCU health and SD card.
Feel free to ask anything and I will answer as best I can. If you have specific questions about the implementation code feel free to ask them as well.
Thanks for your interest.
Ken
And thank you Ken. EDIT: this was written a week or so back and Ken's software may well have moved on from some of the points listed here.
Cheers!
Rod |
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