TOP 5 advantages of the latest generation DJI Phantom quadrocopters (in terms of boom)

I sit and read the giktayms on topics of interest to me and find here such an article , they say what DJI is bad and terrible.

There were many opinions and facts in the comments.
Yes, I agree, expensive device. Yes, on your beloved APM and Pixhawk you can put together a great copter (tiltrotor plane, airplane, rover, boat). Many features that are announced in new phantoms in one way or another have already been implemented by the community.
But a candy wrapper is a commercial product that is successfully sold in large print runs. Its upcoming rival 3DR is far behind. In this article, you can see that DJI makes many times more sales than 3DR. Although Parrot sells more, they have a different class of device. The number of self-assembly is difficult to calculate, but in real life I see them very rarely.



So let's look at the candy wrapper from a different angle and find advantages from the point of view of the geek.

1. DJI Lightbridge

Here, Lightbridge means the version from Inspire and Phantom.

Would you like to fly away for a couple of kilometers and still have an HD picture? And if the first is solved by any analog transmitter, then with the second ambush - there are simply no cheap transmitters for transmitting high-resolution video with low delay. If you want to have such a video link as on the third candy wrapper, you will have to fork out for a price of more than half its cost (though it is worth mentioning that the guys from the virtual machine have their own solution for a more humane price).

“Why do you need hd?” - you might ask. But to understand this, you need to try - a picture with a minimum delay (here it is from 0.2s) and a high resolution (720p) gives a lot more pleasure. Also a definite plus is the support of many virtual presence helmets programs, where good resolution is vital for the senses.

Ok, I hope that high resolution is the common good no longer raises questions. But a claim to the camera may arise. And if there are quite good cameras for inspectors, developed in collaboration with blackmagick (with interchangeable optics, a large matrix, video recording in equal), then it’s really impossible to change the camera to better ones on phantoms. Although, as they say, if you really want to, you can:



At the same time, the video from the built-in camera to Lightbridge, apparently, is transmitted via HDMI:



This video , as well as the article g0l'a, is an indirect confirmation of this.

In contrast to intercepting a Wi-Fi video link in OSMO and Co., I do not yet know how to capture images with the continuation of the software for controlling the copter. Alternatively, you can capture either from the screen or the HDMI that the inspector has and can be installed on the phantom console to display the image on an arbitrary monitor, or organize the broadcast.



Of the minuses: floating delay from 0.2 to 1 second, periodic friezes, the complexity of broadcasting.

2. Hack Wi-Fi

The DJI Phantom 2 Vision +, Phantom 3 Standart and Osmo models are equipped with a Wi-Fi module, to which you can connect and listen to what is transmitted through it.



A good how-to how to connect was recently found by me on the Internet from the hawkish citizen Gol . In short, you can implement your video streaming, which is very good. But I'm more interested in digging into telemetry than I will try to do in the near future.

3. Programming ability

DJI gives you access to the API of its products. You can access the control of the copter, gimbal and camera. Everything is available for reading, including information from the remote control and batteries. Based on this, the SDKs create many applications, including for narrow business tasks, such as cartography.



SDK is developing quite actively. By the end of 2015 / beginning of 2016, a major transition was made to the new major version of the SDK (from 2 to 3). Often new commits are visible in the repository.

For myself, I made a small program for iOS, which removes diagnostic information from the drone. Sometimes I use an example from the repository, which allows you to program the flight by points and conduct shooting (for some reason, this function is missing in the regular application).

In general, DJI actively encourages developers for its platform. Now, for example, there is the third DJI Developer Challange with very interesting tasks and valuable prizes.

The community around MAVLink is also active and has its own development tools, but the threshold for entering them is higher. 3DR is now trying to solve this problem and is luring developers to its development platform .

4. Battery "with the head"

Since the days of DJI Phantom 2, such a copter element as a battery has acquired its own brain and interesting features. In fact, DJI Intelligent Flight Battery is a separate device with its controller and firmware, which is periodically updated. You can’t get the controller version in the DJI GO app, but the SDK provides this option. It would be interesting to correlate between the behavior of the battery and the version of its firmware, but so far I do not know how to do this (in fact, I need to combine data from a regular application with info from my own, but I don’t see a simple and convenient way).



In the meantime, let's see the most interesting features in my opinion:

• The "sleep" mode is turned on after an idle time of 20 minutes, not allowing the battery to be wasted in vain.
• Auto discharge function, which allows you not to worry about long-term storage of the battery. The controller takes care of discharging up to 65% (optimal for long-term storage). Although I read on the forums that all the same, the battery runs out at 0 in two months.
• The battery stores errors for the last 30 days, which is useful for its subsequent maintenance and repair. You can read this story through DJI GO or take it through the SDK.
• Automatic balancing of cells in the battery when charging is a feature of a smart battery.
• The exchange of information with the onboard PC of the drone in real time, which allows the battery to send signals to the copter for an emergency landing and report errors.

5. The community of enthusiasts

I used to think that only OpenSource has powerful community. If you look at the world of MAVLink (APM, Pixhawk), you can immediately see a lot of activity on sites like diydrones.com.



Digging a little deeper, I found a powerful foreign community, Phantom Pilots , where not only those who are involved in aerial photography, but also many techies who are engaged in reversing iron and software. You can find a lot of interesting news or features.

In the end

Despite the fact that Phantom is a closed system, you can dig it a little and go beyond the limits. With all this, the copter is already ready out of the box for simple flight and shooting and there is no need to adjust the pids before each flight.

I did not describe the new features that were introduced in the new Phantom 4 model, because he himself did not touch him and did not find good reviews with "immersion" inside. The function of flying around obstacles looks promising. Judging by the company's previous product, namely Guidance , they already have the experience and technology to work around obstacles. I hope that soon I can dig in more detail. And I wonder if it will be possible to access this system?

I want to devote the following article to the analysis of the phantom battery.

There is a little research based on the processing of hundreds of logs that I collect on this site .