Been researching drones with programmable automated flight capabilities, and almost went with a 3DR Iris+ or Solo, but the P3P looked like a better option from both a cost and support model, with a more polished and integrated 4K camera. I got in on the MicroCenter sale thanks to a good friend in SoCal willing ship one to me.
As I anticipated the arrival of the P3P I watched scores of first time user videos gearing up for the task at hand. I also decided to get Litchi for my LG G Pad 7.0 Android tablet, this turned out to be a mistake (read on).
I headed out with friends to check out ghost towns on our coveted annual Memorial Day ghost town get away. The P3P came the day before my trip, so I didn't get an opportunity to try it until the first day of my trip.
From my hotel room, I unboxed everything to check out and make sure it was working prior to taking it outside. Right out of the gate, when I first started up DJI GO it prompted me to do a software upgrade, and I had already watched several P3P getting started videos that also suggested doing the firmware upgrades, so off it went. The RC said it's firmware update was successful, so next up was the P3P firmware upgrade. Took a while, but it completed successfully.
Day one was a flop. Had major issues the first day trying to fly even getting DJI GO to link with the P3P. One time out of probably 100 tries, it finally synched up with Safe to fly GPS and I was able to fly it. Very nice, stable, feels solid with flying, so much easier to fly then the cheapie SYMA I previously had. When I got back to my hotel room I fired everything up to troubleshoot it, and discovered that even though the remote control software upgrade said it was successful, I noticed when getting the various firmware versions that the RC was blank, that's not good. I re-flashed the RC firmware, and then had to re-link the RC with the P3P, and this time it took and everything linked up, well, almost everything, more on that in a minute, but before that I also wanted to point out that it wanted me to calibrate the IMU, so I did that and discovered the "Aircraft warming up" message on subsequent flights. I calibrated everything that needed to be - compass, IMU, remote, gimbal, etc.
Day two - DJI GO was now working, finally! Had some fun flying it around and taking video. Forgot to enable the video on a few flights manually, although I thought I had the auto-video on flight option enabled...hmm
So now for my big moment. I put together a cool video sequence for the P3P to shoot using the Litchi mission hub online app, but no matter what I tried, Litchi was a fail on my LG G Pad 7.0.
Day 3 - Back at the hotel the next morning I tried a multitude of things to get it to work that were suggested in other Litchi Android threads, and after wasting hours on it, I decided that instead of wasting more vacation time to troubleshoot the Litchi app on the android tablet, I decided to try it from my iphone 6+, and that amazingly worked perfectly! Finally, after dicking around for three days to get this thing into flight worthy condition, after multiple software upgrades, calibrations, and swapping tablet platforms, it is finally working, with only two days left of holiday to get videos, but alas it was working.
Interestingly before I downloaded the Litchi app, I had emailed Litchi to ask if there was a way I could try their app on both my Android and IOS device to see which one I preferred, and they said you'd have to pay for both versions.
Anyhow, hopefully sharing my experiences will help someone else avoid all the countless hours of wasted time I spent when I first got my P3P!
Happy flying,
Brian
As I anticipated the arrival of the P3P I watched scores of first time user videos gearing up for the task at hand. I also decided to get Litchi for my LG G Pad 7.0 Android tablet, this turned out to be a mistake (read on).
I headed out with friends to check out ghost towns on our coveted annual Memorial Day ghost town get away. The P3P came the day before my trip, so I didn't get an opportunity to try it until the first day of my trip.
From my hotel room, I unboxed everything to check out and make sure it was working prior to taking it outside. Right out of the gate, when I first started up DJI GO it prompted me to do a software upgrade, and I had already watched several P3P getting started videos that also suggested doing the firmware upgrades, so off it went. The RC said it's firmware update was successful, so next up was the P3P firmware upgrade. Took a while, but it completed successfully.
Day one was a flop. Had major issues the first day trying to fly even getting DJI GO to link with the P3P. One time out of probably 100 tries, it finally synched up with Safe to fly GPS and I was able to fly it. Very nice, stable, feels solid with flying, so much easier to fly then the cheapie SYMA I previously had. When I got back to my hotel room I fired everything up to troubleshoot it, and discovered that even though the remote control software upgrade said it was successful, I noticed when getting the various firmware versions that the RC was blank, that's not good. I re-flashed the RC firmware, and then had to re-link the RC with the P3P, and this time it took and everything linked up, well, almost everything, more on that in a minute, but before that I also wanted to point out that it wanted me to calibrate the IMU, so I did that and discovered the "Aircraft warming up" message on subsequent flights. I calibrated everything that needed to be - compass, IMU, remote, gimbal, etc.
Day two - DJI GO was now working, finally! Had some fun flying it around and taking video. Forgot to enable the video on a few flights manually, although I thought I had the auto-video on flight option enabled...hmm
So now for my big moment. I put together a cool video sequence for the P3P to shoot using the Litchi mission hub online app, but no matter what I tried, Litchi was a fail on my LG G Pad 7.0.
Day 3 - Back at the hotel the next morning I tried a multitude of things to get it to work that were suggested in other Litchi Android threads, and after wasting hours on it, I decided that instead of wasting more vacation time to troubleshoot the Litchi app on the android tablet, I decided to try it from my iphone 6+, and that amazingly worked perfectly! Finally, after dicking around for three days to get this thing into flight worthy condition, after multiple software upgrades, calibrations, and swapping tablet platforms, it is finally working, with only two days left of holiday to get videos, but alas it was working.
Interestingly before I downloaded the Litchi app, I had emailed Litchi to ask if there was a way I could try their app on both my Android and IOS device to see which one I preferred, and they said you'd have to pay for both versions.
Anyhow, hopefully sharing my experiences will help someone else avoid all the countless hours of wasted time I spent when I first got my P3P!
Happy flying,
Brian
