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Circular Waypoint Missions with Litchi

NikTheBuilder

Active Member
Join
Nov 29, 2020
Messages
28
Loc
Cambridge, UK
I'd been toying with the idea of a repeatable flight plan to be able to do something like the 3-season timelapse posted by
@joeke3el earlier this year.

Lichi seems to be the app for this, and in reading around I came across a thread on MavicPilots asking about the best way to create circular flights as part of a waypoints mission. The only answer better than 'draw on your screen' was tantalisingly incomplete,so I thought I would work through completing the solution...

In the attached .xlsx spreadsheet, specify the centre of the circle, the direction of travel, radius and number of circuits to fly. Yoi can chose to spiral in or out, and to climb or descend in a helix.

Switch to the 'Save as CSV' sheet and either copy the rows to a new CSV file or save the excel sheet as a .csv file and import into the Litchi Mission Hub.

The resulting mission contains a single waypoint at the center of the circle and 72 additional points following the number of circuits you've selected. The aircraft will point to the centre of the circle, but there is no POI set so no automatic adjustment of the gimbal angle.

Hope thi is useful to someoe, somewhere. Comments welcomed.

Nik

1608022815203.png

1608023529163.png

Don't forget to check your safety and obstacle clearance in LVM

The default numbers in the spreadsheet should produce this mission:
Screenshot 2020-12-15 093208.png


Update 19th December: Fixed issue whereby spreadsheet would report an error with curve lengths and produce an invalid Litchi mission if the user selected an anti-clockwise circuit.
 

Attachments

  • LitchiCircles.zip
    24.8 KB · Views: 32
Last edited:
Today was my first flight with it, and notwithstanding the app crashing twice (once during a mission) and flying into the top-most branches of a 60' tree (landed in a bush at ground level, no damage done), it was good experience.

The behaviour of the drone isn't what I had initially expected when tracking a POI, in that it transitions evenly from pointing in direction A to direction B, which doesn't necessarily keep it pointing at the POI if the waypoints aren't set correctly. It's unfortunate that this happened on the only mission I hadn't checked out in LVM.

Can Litchi send thumbnails or full-res images to my device like DJIGo4 does?
 
  • Like
Reactions: Haggi
I've had a DM recently from T'Jingles, who has added significant functionality to this tool. He's posted this over on the Litchi forums
forums.flylitchi.com
 

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