Circular Waypoint Missions with Litchi

[NikTheBuilder]

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





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

The default numbers in the spreadsheet should produce this mission:



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.

 

[Dave Canada]

great app for waypoints and actions around poi,s

 

[NikTheBuilder]

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?

 

[jimlips]

This is outstanding work! I've always wished there would be a built-in function to Mission Hub to do a perfect circle.

 

[nilanjan118]

This is fantastic. Thanks for sharing.

 

[NikTheBuilder]

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

 

[MIner_jeff]

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

@NikTheBuilder would have a link to find J'Tingles post on the Mavic Forum. My searches are coming up empty.

Thanks,
Jeff

 

[Mirano]

Is there an update on this @NikTheBuilder ?

 

[NikTheBuilder]

Apologies - I sent a DM to my contact in March but no news.

I re-read the original message I had from him, which was actually asking my permission to share the derived work, but didn't actually say that he had done so.

The changes T'Jingles says he's made are "I added capability to insert launch and recovery points, safety points for launch and recovery. Also the ability to input in metric or imperial. Automated the export to cvs [sic] task. Added alerts to trap for invalid entries. All these changes required conversion of the workbook to macro-enabled."

There's a user with the same user name on MavicPilots.com, and he's still an active member there (logged in in last 30 days), so it may be worth joining and DM'ing him there. Post back for the record if you get anything.

Nik