Litchi Waypoint Missions for your Drone Business

In this lecture we're going to take a first look at the Litchi interface.  Litchi offers a host of special shooting modes.  FPV (First Person View), Waypoint Missions, Orbit Missions, Panoramic photography, Focus, and tracking as well.  For many drone pilots this might be the only app you'll ever need.

Litchi has so many options that you know there's got to be a lot of settings that go along with the options.  Overall system settings, photography settings, and settings unique to each of the special modes Litchi offers.  In this lecture we're going to take a look at the main app settings accessible from the upper right corner of the Litchi App

For most any decent drone app on the market there will be photo and video settings to deal with as well.  While this course doesn't cover creating the optimal photography and video setups, we will take a look at where the settings are.  It will be up to you to improve on your still and video settings to get the most out of your images and video.

Before launching into the main part of the course, Waypoint Missions, we'll take a quick look at the FPV interface overall.  We'll also launch the Mavic 2 Pro in FPV mode to give students a feel for the basic interface on Litchi.

In this lecture we're going to introduce the feature that you're really here to see.  The Waypoint mission mode.  Creating waypoints can help you replicate flights time after time of the same location.  Same speed, same flight path, same settings to generate time lapse video and photography starts here.

Litchi offers several different ways to setup missions.  In this lecture we'll take a look at the Litchi Mission Hub.  Drone operators can log in to Litchi's mission hub website and view previous missions, and also create new missions right from the website. 

Oh, and Litchi also syncs your missions between your smart phones, tablets, and the Mission Hub website!

Drone pilots can also plan missions for Litchi directly on their smartphones & tablets.  Both iOS and Android are supported, and the amazing feature to note is that once you build a mission on one platform, that mission will be sync'd to all other registered devices.  So you could plan out a mission on a larger tablet, and then when you go into the field to execute the mission you could switch to a smaller device.  Less gear to carry around!

The final way Drone Pilots can plan a mission  is to go out into the field, connect up your drone, controller, and smart device, and create waypoints while flying.  This allows pilots to see the exact location of the drone while setting up their mission.  This is by far the most accurate way to set up missions when being exacting is what you need.  It allows you to identify hazards while on location, work around them, and create missions for compelling photography and video. 

Plus, setting up your missions in the field is fun, and allows you a little more flight time!

In the last lecture we setup a mission with our drone, controller, and smart device.  Now it's time to take a look at our results.

Photo waypoint missions are great for creating time lapse photography over the course of days, weeks, or months.  We setup our mission waypoints and setup our shots at the same time.  Each time we run the mission we'll get an image that matches up with all previous missions.  These types of photography missions allow commercial drone pilots to provide clients with extremely accurate views of a project location time and time again.

In this lecture we'll take a closer look at the global settings for your waypoint mission.  What you setup in the settings menu will effect how the overall mission works.  Don't worry, in the next lecture we'll talk about customizing each waypoint if you need to.

In this lecture you'll learn about setting each waypoint up.  You can do different things waypoint by waypoint if you need to.  It's actually quite amazing.  The level of control you're offered by Litchi allows some very customized autonomous flights!

You can create global settings for your flights, individual waypoint settings.....and you can do batch editing for your flights as well.  Litchi allows an incredible amount of control, and it offers so many ways to edit your missions to perfection!

Litchi's Orbit Missions offer some powerful features as well.  Nothing on the order of Waypoint missions, but if you need a quick orbit of a structure or an area you'll be interested in this feature as well.

As I noted at the beginning of this course, Litchi's Waypoint Missions are incredibly powerful and can be used for a wide array of projects.  While we talked a lot about Drone Construction Progression reporting, there are applications that we haven't even thought of yet.  With a little creativity I'm sure you can find business uses for waypoint missions in your own drone business as well.

As student comments come in I'll be looking to updating this course.  So please be sure to leave comments and reviews and we'll work together to grow this course further.

This isn't really a simple question.  After using Litchi to document a job site you're just at the beginning of the process for delivery to your clients.  How do you want to present your results from your Litchi Flights?  Video only?  A custom slide show presentation?  Power Point?  Keynote?  A custom website?  There are so many options.

This second bonus lecture gives students a view into adding multiple clips over multiple months in order to create a progression video.  You don't have to be a Final Cut user to understand what's going on.  The bottom line is pretty straightforward.  Delivering final progression reports to clients will require video editing knowledge, photo editing knowledge, Internet sharing platforms, web development, and more.  This isn't here to discourage you, but instead to clue you in on how you may want to go about getting your final content to your clients.