While on a shoot in Moab Utah, I was telling my buddy how great my DJI Phantom 4 drone was, that I hadn’t had a single issue in my estimated 60 flights in the past year.
The first shoot we did was easy, dirt road East of Moab maybe 20 miles, shooting his group of motorcycles from multiple angles. Then we went to our next location, Onion Creek about 3 miles further up the highway. We drive up the dirt road crossing the stream maybe 7 times before we pick a spot to shoot from.
We coordinate the shot, the angles and distances for the bikes to drive. I launch and everything seems good. I line up the shot, observing the path and obstacles. There is an abundance of towering red rock making for some great scenery.
I’m following the riders and keeping an eye on the connection status. It’s time to turn around, and I decide to stop the video snap a photo.
This photo
This is where the DJI GO 4 app decides to crash!!!! Granted, it’s only about 300 feet away from the controller, and I’ve set it to return home upon signal loss, so all I need to do is wait. As it’s supposedly on it’s way back, I’m going to load the app again and try to connect, maybe I’ll connect on the way back and we can continue the shoot without a full landing. The app loads finally and I attempt to connect. Well this happens ALL THE TIME when I’ve got to reload the app, and Phantom 4 PRO is selected by default, when I only have the standard Phantom 4. I realize this and close out of the app once again and surely this time I’ll connect to the correct device.
I’m not hearing or seeing my drone at the moment, nerves get a little more tensed.
It should be on it’s way back.
I look down at the map inside the app, and my heart drops. It says “Home” is the last location we shot, 4 miles away!!!!!! Full on panic. I hop in my car and shout at the bikers as I pass them, holding the remote out the window with one hand, steering through river crossings and a bumpy dirt road “I’ve gotta go my drone just flew back to the last shot location!!!” to which they replied with sympathetic “Whoa no”.
Finally out on the highway, still holding my controller out the window in vain, hoping to see something, ANYTHING! No such luck.
ARRRGGHHHGHGHG there are mountain bikers on the 2 lane highway and there’s a line of cars waiting to pass them one by one. HURRY! My drone has to be landing now in the middle of that dirt road, I MUST get to it before a jeep runs right over it.
Finally I see the turnoff coming up as I’m still frantically looking to the sky, maybe I’m lucky enough that it is descending now. I park and get out, to my building panic, it’s not there. Did it run out of battery, was the flight distance too long? Still nothing on the app.
I look at where I just drove from and I have a visual straight line of flight. I’m running out in the desert, checking every sagebrush, jumping every sagebrush in my path. This continues for 20 minutes. Oh and no cellular service, so if something happens, they can’t contact me. Did it hit my critical battery level and start descending where it was? If I find it, how bad will the damage be, will I ever fly it again? Will I ever fly ANY drone again? I may not be able to recover from this. Plus, all of my footage was on it, the shoot I did for these guys is going to be a bunch of wasted time. We drove 4 hours from home to get here!
One of the riders finds me and rolls up, asks what I’m doing. I explain I can’t find it, it’s lost, and this is the first and only “incident” I’ve had with this drone.
Now there are a few times in a man’s life where he hears something from somebody, and it classifies as a lifetime ranking experience. He says my drone LANDED right where I launched from over on Onion Creek! He said it landed so straight and smooth, they thought I was controlling it from somewhere.
Huge tidal wave of relief!. That’s the closest I’ve come to kissing a grown man. A handshake will do.
We all head back to Onion Creek and I’ve never been so happy to see my Phantom 4 sitting right there, without a scratch, and still 50% battery. It had operated and landed EXACTLY AS ADVERTISED!!!
So what happened? Because the app crashed, it loaded again and still had Home pointing to the first shoot. I noticed all of my pre-loaded maps had disappeared too, this happens every time for me when the app crashes. I take careful preparation to load the maps into the app before I head out to a remote area. That app crashes, and all gone.
So the drone correctly recorded the last launch point and returned straight back to it, like an angel slowly descending out of heaven clothed in white.
Great job on the reliability of the Phantom 4, but that app MUST BE FIXED!!!!!
EDIT, by the way, here's the finished product, enjoy
Pretty nerve racking story. Glad your drone was waiting for you when you got back. I'm running an iPhones 7 Plus and so far I have had no app issues. I did have a friend running the exact same setup, and he said he had one app crash, but he set his to 'hover' when RC signal lost. It was right in position where he last saw it, so he rebooted the app and reacquired the signal and all was well. I'd rather avoid these experiences.
My app crash all the time on Samsung S7 and Huawei mediatab m2. With old software before DJI GO4 have no problems at all, why DJI did step back on this new software ( And i never find any working solution on android, start thinking about buying something from apple just for droning
If the App' crashes then you still have full signal and control using the RC. From what I can see the App' crashed, the aircraft then hovered (or whatever was being sent from the control sticks) waiting for a command. You jumped into car with RC, and when sufficiently far away the RC connection to aircraft was lost and it returned to home. In the situation you describe the safest course of action might have been to just turn off RC (loss of signal), and wait a few minutes for it to come back.
Bottom line is that you can fly aircraft using RC only, although you would be missing the video feed and telemetry information so would not be a good experience.
BearDrone Posted at 2017-5-27 08:57
Pretty nerve racking story. Glad your drone was waiting for you when you got back. I'm running an iPhones 7 Plus and so far I have had no app issues. I did have a friend running the exact same setup, and he said he had one app crash, but he set his to 'hover' when RC signal lost. It was right in position where he last saw it, so he rebooted the app and reacquired the signal and all was well. I'd rather avoid these experiences.
Interesting, I don't remember having any luck reconnecting to the Phantom once I started the app back up, I believe I've always had to land it and start over.
In fact, the app crashed on me last week while filming this video, the drone was hovering maybe only 100 feet out, clear line of sight, and I opened up the app again to see if it would connect. Maybe I ran out of patience, as I was on a mountain top, so I manually piloted it back to me for landing. This is the video I was shooting then:
Aardvark Posted at 2017-5-28 23:51
If the App' crashes then you still have full signal and control using the RC. From what I can see the App' crashed, the aircraft then hovered (or whatever was being sent from the control sticks) waiting for a command. You jumped into car with RC, and when sufficiently far away the RC connection to aircraft was lost and it returned to home. In the situation you describe the safest course of action might have been to just turn off RC (loss of signal), and wait a few minutes for it to come back.
Bottom line is that you can fly aircraft using RC only, although you would be missing the video feed and telemetry information so would not be a good experience.
I've got it set to RTH if signal is lost, and it's possible it was ascending after I hit the RTH button from the remote as a Hail Mary.
The funny thing is, as I was driving back to the assumed Home it was flying to, I was actually driving closer to the drone and then right under it, as it passed over me and safely landed.
So I do have trouble reconnecting once the app crashes, I was directly beneath it at one point with my remote held out o the window like a lunatic driver.
On another note, the original DJI GO app never crashed on me, I've probably got 50 flights on it in the last year. Now I'm on DJI GO 4 with all of the same hardware, and I'm nervous as hell each time I fly. With Murphy's Law, the app could crash and DJI would see me at fault just because I did or did not do one tiny little safety precaution that gets them out of responsibility. I have that in mind every week now as I fly and it concerns me.
Aardvark Posted at 2017-5-28 23:51
If the App' crashes then you still have full signal and control using the RC. From what I can see the App' crashed, the aircraft then hovered (or whatever was being sent from the control sticks) waiting for a command. You jumped into car with RC, and when sufficiently far away the RC connection to aircraft was lost and it returned to home. In the situation you describe the safest course of action might have been to just turn off RC (loss of signal), and wait a few minutes for it to come back.
Bottom line is that you can fly aircraft using RC only, although you would be missing the video feed and telemetry information so would not be a good experience.
And if you don´t have the App display, you may still confirm that the link between RC and aircraft is up by the checking if the LED next to the battery charge status indicators is green (connected) or red (disconnected).
It happened to me once, that the App said "Aircraft disconnected" when I was about 600 meters away. I thought "ok, it will RTH shortly". Then it was taking to long. I started to become very nervous about it and decided to activate RTH via the controller which worked. It was at this time that I took notice that the RC LED was still green, so I had lost the feed from the aircraft but still had control.
Justin McFarlan Posted at 2017-5-30 07:10
I've got it set to RTH if signal is lost, and it's possible it was ascending after I hit the RTH button from the remote as a Hail Mary.
The funny thing is, as I was driving back to the assumed Home it was flying to, I was actually driving closer to the drone and then right under it, as it passed over me and safely landed.
Justin McFarlan:
While I've had issues with DJIGo 4 on Samsung and nVideo Shield K1 devices, including slow responses, missing parameters and crashes, since I've been using Litchi, I've been failure-free.
I am waiting for the next iteration of DJIGo4 -- whenever they release an update, I always test it out for features and calibration action changes.
But since DJIGo 4 first appeared, it has never proved trustworthy--for me, on Android. Others say it is rock solid on i-devices.
Same here.. Never had a stable experience with DJI Go 4 (either pre P4 or post P4 version as I have P3P and Mavic) Litchi has been rock solid on the P3P but I hear they won't honor warranty or care refresh if you're using Litchi at the time of an incident so I've put up with crashing and restarting Go 4 App with the Mavic as it always keeps connection with the remote itself so I trust if I can't get the App back up in time I just hit RTH or fly in LOS.
My biggest gripe I had last weekend though was Saturday morning I fired up the app to make sure it was all ok and no updates, everything said up to date and Go Fly and camera was operational.. pack up, power everything off, drive out 50 miles with a wifi only device, start it up and bleeding DJI Go prompts I must sign in to my DJI account to continue to use it with the only option to cancel, no skip or sign in later option, as it was a wifi only device and I was out of a data area I couldn't even tether to my mobile to sign in.
Luckily I had Litchi on the phone itself so took the risk and flew the Mavic on it without any problem. Got home turned the Wifi device back on and it signed in without any updates and worked fine! So now I'm paranoid that even after checking before leaving that DJI Go is just going to randomly want to sign in again and not be able to fly.
All of my use has been on Android so I'm tempted to get something like a Ipad Mini 2 to try the Apple version of the App.
Had an odd one today with latest GO 4 running with an iPad Air 2 with the P4. Screen went gray mid-flight and then showed "Ready to Go." Screen showed the basic turn on screen with home point still at home. I thought GO 4 had crashed, but when I restarted GO 4, still a gray screen (No camera,) Got desparate and restarted the RC while GO 4 was still running and it linked back up. Something broke the link between the RC and the P4. Disturbing, but no crash as it was set to hover rather the RTH. All updates are current in the RC and P4 so who knows what is buggy.
RC was set Manually to channel 19 rather than Auto so I don't know what happened or why it broke connection and reset like it did.
yes, - please people, understand - the app is only an app - you can still fly your drone! You can abort RTH.... so from the top, to clear up confusion:
1. app crash will NOT invoke RTH - only losing signal for amount of time (3-5sec?) will, or pressing RTH button on the radio or in the app, or.. smart return home, low battery....
2. if the app crashes, the drone is still controllable, provided the RC link is ok - green LED on the radio.
3. If it goes into RTH and the app crashes, u can cancel RTH with the radio RTH button.
Remember, app is useful, but NOT necessary to fly, and often, when panic sets inn because the app crashes, make sure you remember to check the RC led status and do not panic unnecessarily!
I am, in NO WAY, arguing that app should be crashing... but if it does, be cool, don't overreact, know what to do and what you CAN do.. Heck.. practice! Kill your app mid flight during some nearby flight, se what happens. Restart it, confirm where the home point it.. if it's not where you want it, learn to reset it to where you want it... do all; that till us can do it easily in an emergency....
Phantomski Posted at 2017-5-31 08:56
yes, - please people, understand - the app is only an app - you can still fly your drone! You can abort RTH.... so from the top, to clear up confusion:
1. app crash will NOT invoke RTH - only losing signal for amount of time (3-5sec?) will, or pressing RTH button on the radio or in the app, or.. smart return home, low battery....
2. if the app crashes, the drone is still controllable, provided the RC link is ok - green LED on the radio.
Practice killing the app mid flight, this is a good idea, thanks
OK one more question about reconnecting the app to the drone mid flight after the app crash;
Sometimes I have problems reconnecting the app, and I have to manually land, restart the drone battery, restart the app to get the connection.
What is the reliable way to reconnect the app during flight? How far out can the app connect? If I'm out half a mile, I'd hate to fly it all the way back just to restart and connect, and to have it crash again before I've reached my prior destination. Should I be able to reconnect the app if it's half a mile out?
I've seen this issue, and i had to do it too, but this was ONLY while for a few weeks I also had litchi on my phone.. Once I eliminated that, issues became way less severe..
But, if u cannot reconnect the app, try unplugging the cable while the app is still down, then plug it back in....
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( And i never find any working solution on android, start thinking about buying something from apple just for droning 