David, Matt and Harrison will vouch for our horrific prior experience flying LiDAR w/another brand. We had ZERO confidence going out to a mission and don’t get me started on how bad the processing side was; that was the worst part.
I did a seriously deep-dive into LiDAR options out there and narrowed down to 2 brands. Well, we all know who won out. Rockrobotic beat the 2nd place in every category…and was HALF the cost.
After 6 weeks of weekly missions using the R2A, Reach RS2 and M300 RTK platform, we’re still getting use to this new feeling of real confidence when going out to fly any LiDAR mission. What Harrison and his team has created is just simple, easy to use…and it works. Yes, there will be a glitch here and there but those have not shut down a mission flight or kept us from getting the data we needed.
If you’re on this community, then I’m speaking to the choir, so to speak, but I just felt compelled to share with this community how Rockrobotic has saved and elevated our LiDAR abilities.
I just transitioned from the M600 to M300 and am experiencing the opposite. I’ve spent the last two days trying to fly 200 acres. Both days I had issues coming in and the unit is powered on but is no longer collecting data. Hopefully I can soon get to the same level of confidence.
I feel good about the data itself, but this has happened several times throughout the last 6 months with the Rock and is increasingly frustrating. Are you using pilot or UGCS for your mission planning?
I just pulled in UGCS over the weekend. I suspect the way the pilot app was taking some really sharp turns might have it led to a loss of power on the payload. That’s the best I can come up with. We’ll see how it goes this week with UGCS and hopefully that narrows down the troubles
As for reformatting after every flight, no. But I did buy some extra drives to swap out
ROCK highly recommends to reformat the flash drive before every new mission. make sure it’s FAT32.
the turns shouldn’t affect loss of power; if your R2A is properly attached to the gimbal mount, then it’s got constant power…as long as the R2A is turned on. only 2 ways to lose power on the R2A (during flight) is it come disconnected to the gimbal mount or the drone shuts off.
I am wondering about the integrity of your xt plug’s soldering job.
On my R2A, it was shockingly poor. I re-built my xt60 plug, did a better job soldering on the power leads and it solved my weird power problems.
The only XT-60 on the R2A NSA is the one that comes out of the skyport adapter. Therefore you only need it if you are not powering from a DJI aircraft. As you have the previous version to the NSA and it has the jumper cable that goes from the skyport to the R2A.
QC is paramount for us at Rock and rest assured that after seeing your XT-60 we followed up with the factory team.
All that is the long answer for: Neither @alliance or @RSI_Eric have an XT-60 jumper so that’s not it.
In fact most likely the issue encountered is due to improper USB usage. For such vital data it is important to be very disciplined with your workflow and routine.
We are going to trial the M600 with the R2A soon. Curious what you might tell me about your experience using yours? Will eventually transition to an M300 as well but this is what we have at the moment.
@questdsmith If you don’t have a vibration isolator, I would recommend picking one up. We sell one for the M600 at Rock Robotic. Just contact sales@rockrobotic.com
The M600 works great with the R2A, there is just a bit more vibration that you’ll want to manage.
Thanks Alex we will make sure to get one! What about flight planners? Is there one that works best with the R2A/ m600? In the past we have used litchi.
@questdsmith For the M600, Litchi, Hangar Auto Flight Logic and Maps Made Easy work great. Consider UgCS if you want to dial in your mission plans to maximize your flights.