I’m sure this question has been answered a million times on this discussion platform, but here it goes again…Can Mission Planner work on the DJI Phantom 4 pro V2.0? I aim to conduct a forest health survey with the DJI Phantom 4 pro v2.0, But only want to go foreword with buying the drone if Mission Planner will work on it. I don’t want, and can’t afford to purchase Drone Deploy or other subscription type services (I would rather donate to Mission Planner what I can afford).
Also, in my research, I have chosen the Phantom 4 pro v2.0 for it’s mechanical shutter and 4k video. I plan to use “structure from motion” software to “stitch” the aerial imagery together to form a large mosaic that I hope to process in ArcMap. I hope that the imagery and stitching will be seamless enough that I can used automated classification tools in ArcMap (and of course ground truthing).
Please let me know if you can point me in the right direction. I apologize, I am not very knowledgeable in the drone word as of yet, and I fear I am trying to do something that could be rather complicated.
@Flobber No you can’t.
But there are other options to your problem… If you get the Pix4d app for your cellphone or tablet you can run your missions from there. Same thing with drone deploy. You don’t need to process the images through Pix4d or drone deploy and pay them anything the apps are free. You can fly the mission and capture the images you process with another app. You can also check out Aero Ranger which I run alot on my android tablet. Also you need a newer phone to handle DJI’s sdk. So go here and make sure your phone or tablet is on the list or close https://www.phantomhelp.com/Tips/18/best-tabletsphones-for-dji-go
Note only have one app installed at a time. Things get goofy having more then one installed. Try them out one at a time. Pix4d is what i usually use for mission with a P4P I have for that type of work.
I run Ardupilot on everything else I fly (15 or so drones over the years) but It is hard to get a camera and flight times the P4P has for the price building a drone at the moment. I have multiple Solos but the GoPro isn’t a solution. Not to mention the Global Shutter for mapping. It killed me many times over making the decision to buy a DJI product but I had to for this reason.
Mission planner is made for Ardupilot an open source flight controller software. DJI is closed source and only works with software made for it’s flight controller software.
Hope this helps PM me if you have any further Questions. We are all not fans of the White Whale here in Arducountry. But sometimes as a businesse you need to make hard decision.
I enjoyed this discussion. After using Mission Planner for years, I am a HUGE FAN! It is so easy to use for planning a mission and has MUCH MORE flexibility than other mission planning platforms. I use it to teach all of my UAS students! I fly the open source autopilot on some of my research drones. However, I do also fly some DJI drones. The mission planning software on it is, well, less than satisfactory for mapping and 3d modeling. And it was VERY late to the game. I wish some programmers in this community would create the ability to plan a mission in Mission Planner and then import it into an app like Litchi or similar. I know DJI is closed source but the do allow SDK. I am NOT a programmer, but I am a “super user” of all things UAS mapping. I would love to work with someone on this. Anyone interest? We could publish our results.
Hey @aircool00! Would you like to expand on your experience using Aero Ranger? It looks like a very capable app, but besides the couple of YouTube videos, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of info. What aircraft are you flying with it, what do you use it for, how stable is it? Can you produce results (export photos, video, data like tags) without using their Cloud solution?
Cheers!
I use it on a P4P as my daily driver for the DJI GO app. It supports mission planning and has some custom missions not seen else ware. I haven’t used the tagging feature as i have not had a use for it yet in my work. So I can’t say about offline. Their cloud is free and you can tag images and make reports from the site and I think you can tag and annotate right in the app. If you shoot a grid mission you can have the app set up to stick and overlay on top the google maps used int he app so you now have a current otho type photo tiles with current imagery. These sync down from the bird to your phone/tablet. But like pix4dmapper it take time for them to come down and likely goof up on a battery swap. I don’t use that feature as I also turn it off on Pix mapper. You can shoot photos and video like normal on any app they save to the SD card. Download it and give it a test drive. It has been my daily driver for about a year now. my only problem is that in missions you set everything in metric even though you have in option in the menu for imperial. So if you using metric then it is a non issue. I need to work out all my conversions on site or use another app that just works for certain missions.
Thanks for the heads up I forgot about that project. I had a apk of an older version but hadn’t tested it out. They pulled the .apk files which I guess is a good thing for security peace of mind but it looks like it is abandonware right now. But I might try to compile it and see if it works with newer WhiteWhale SDK’s. I personally am waiting to get a better sony camera so I can fly my ardupilot drones for work.
Thanks @aircool00, very helpful. Dont’ mind the metric ;-). As you’re using it quite a bit I guess you haven’t had any connection or stability issues? I was reading about Dronelink and how you can link different missions such as an orbit and a grid into one flight. Can you do this in AeroRanger as well or do you have to fly them as separate missions?
“Their cloud is free”, I wonder about their business model and suspect it will only be free for a short time. I like their approach though.
Edit: This morning I was actually just playing around with the AeroRanger app trying to set up a “Building Mission”. The idea of 2 shots overhead and two full orbits should give a good overall coverage of say a house. For the sake of argument, the app designed one orbit at 30m alt with a 21m radius and one at 50m alt with a 35m radius, both with a 55 deg camera angle. This means the drone will take a photo of the house at exactly the same angle, just two different distances, not very useful if you wanted to use different angles for say photogrammetry. I also found the radius of all individual waypoints (when you edit them) to be set at 15m instead of the 21 and 35m? And the slider for waypoint radius has a15m max? And when projecting the orbit with the 35m radius onto Google Maps, the circle on the ground only has a 20m radius. In other words a couple of the numbers seem to be off / incorrect. Did you experience any similar issues?