Hi guys! Back in the day I bought a DJI Mavic (1st gen) for my travels, when they were not so absolutely obnoxious about sending ALL your flight logs back to the motherland. As the obnoxiousness increased, I ended up installing a CFW (Merlin, I think) on the drone, so I could fly unrestricted and with no logged-in account on the phone (custom modded app), with the app requiring no callback to any server. But seems these days the drone is increasingly misbehaving. Might be due to old age, but it tends to not detect obstacles at all, and also doesn’t detect the floor, so landing is…hairy.

So I’d like to have some sort of replacement, hopefully with similar flying aids (GPS positioning and obstacle detection at least, more are welcome), and hopefully smaller & foldable… but without the need to call home at every damn time. Is this possible? What are the recommendations these days? Can newer DJI drones be modded in the same manner? Are the alternatives?

Thanks!

  • TunaLobster
    13·
    1 year ago

    The DoD has a list of approved drone companies now. Some have similar features of distance sensors and such. Others try to cut costs a bit or put the money else where such as nicer motors or better GPS. Some of them even run the open source autopilot Ardupilot. https://www.diu.mil/blue-uas-cleared-list

    If those DoD options don’t seem to be the right fit, there are still many commerical off the shelf options that use Ardupilot (no calling home at all) or PX4. No calling home, and (with Ardupilot at least) you’ll be able to update the firmware on your own. This can gain you bug fixes and new features without waiting on the company.

    If those don’t seem to have what you are looking for, we’re down to DIY! Which is fun in its own way. There have been a ton of advancements in the DIY space since DJI became more mainstream. Lots of cool frame options and some very powerful processors by comparison to DJI.

    I’ll leave a link to the Ardupilot and PX4 docs which list a lot of information about the last 2 options. https://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/common-rtf.html https://docs.px4.io/main/en/complete_vehicles/

    • iturnedintoanewt@lemm.eeOP
      3·
      1 year ago

      Thanks…As this is for traveling, I’d like to focus mostly in fully built products, and specifically compact/small ones. DIY is out of the question at this point, I’m afraid. EDIT: Uh…is diu.mil down?

    • iturnedintoanewt@lemm.eeOP
      4·
      1 year ago

      Thanks…As a DJI owner myself, I pretty much know how much it wanted to phone home. After some update of the app, the drone would not fly if it didn’t at least check home once every month or so. And it forcefully updated the drone so it would reject the drone from taking off. And it would expire the login on the older app if you wanted to keep it, so you were pushed in all directions towards a phone-home-based model. It wasn’t this way in the beginning, and after some initial checks, the app could be kept offline. But after I got burnt with after-sales practices, I’d rather keep other models in mind. Or at least one that is easy to hack and forget.

  • scala
    72·
    1 year ago

    DJI is has parts made by Huawei. Definitely avoid.

    The other option is Autel. Most of their software is open source and their parts are mostly Taiwanese made.