Monday, October 9, 2017

Find my drone

Another DJI feature that is not well documented.

It actually works quite well.



I did a little experiment and the screenshot above shows the location of the drone and the options to make the brushless motors beep.

Once again, this is a prime example of how DJI fail to explain how functions of their product and seem to rely on the Internet forums to provide information on them. If you search for "DJI Find my Drone" or "ESC Beeping" you will find many posts that allude to how this function works. However, there is no explanation of what ESC means and how the beeping is to be used in finding the drone.

ESC - is Electronic Speed Control(ler) and it turns out that you can use the controller to made the motors act as a speaker/beeper. This beeping and the Smart LED options appear if you click on the drones location on the map. These buttons will also appear if the drone has been lost for a long(ish) time, see below. and the drones battery is exhausted.

As the forums tell you the beeping and LED functions will not be available unless you still have an RC connection with the drone. The buttons to make the motors beep is triggered by tapping on the "lost location" on the map.This would be the case (hopefully) in the immediate event of a crash or a flyaway as you hopefully would have sufficient battery power left. You will also be able to see the radio (RC) connection signal level, the number of GPS satellites the drone can currently see and the remaining drone battery level. If the drone has performed an automatic RTH due to an RC connection loss of failure to access a sufficient GPS signal the figures you may see are the last recorded values before the loss occurred.

Using your Smartphone, using its own GPS, you will be able to walk or drive to the drone location by viewing your relative position on the map. When you get close you should be able to hear the beeping or see the LEDs. If the battery gets exhausted then this will not be an option.

Even if you don't have an RC connection you will still be able to locate the last recorded co-ordinates by using the map in the dji Go app or even use Google maps to provide you with directions to the drone. You can test the "Find my drone" operation even if you have not lost your drone as the app will record the co-ordinates of the last place that you landed successfully.

The most important feature here is that the "Find my drone" function is useful for both situations where an immediate crash or flyaway has occurred or even when the drone jut goes AWOL and you cannot find it immediately. The information on the last will be stored in the DJI Go app until the next flight has been made. You can check this at anytime by selecting the function from the main screen of the app.

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