Dronelink Flight

There is a learning curve to this app, but like all good things in life, rewards come to those who are patient. Once you get past that you’re in for a treat. This software really does feel like something I dreamed about as a child and the Dronelink team actually made it happen. Those who are familiar with software development methods (or pay attention to what Dronelink tells you in their marketing—They make this very clear!) will quickly recognize how this has been built with extreme reusability in mind. Most of the other flight automation tools I’ve seen aren’t built this way, to their detriment. Once you build up your “base” of custom components, new flight plans are a matter of copying them into a new plan and making some adjustments. It gets faster and faster each time.

This app has great potential, however, if you are looking to use this app with the Mavic mini, this is not for you. I recommend waiting for the 3rd party application market to mature before you throw away twenty ($20!) dollars at an unusable app. If you do however dare to purchase this app, expect for it to work about a quarter of the time at best. Expect to waste about a third to half of every battery waiting for the app to calculate movement while your drone hovers 20 feet off the ground. Expect to encounter frequent “telemetry delayed” errors as well even if you have a powerful mobile device connected over high speed WiFi. Expect to have your drone stuck in the sky mid mission while you frantically gamble as to wether the app can recalculate in time or if you’d be better off just landing and waiting for it to figure itself out. Additionally you better hope that the commands the app does come up with are good as the latency in the video feed ranges from 1 to 10 seconds so good luck saving anything with that. In conclusion, when the app does work it works beautifully; however, it’s flaws cannot be ignored for its high price tag and for that reason I simply cannot recommend this app.

By far the most powerful flight automation app available for DJI drones. It’s virtually limitless in terms of what you can program a drone to do. I love the previewer which allows me to virtual plan and design complex flights in 3D before I get to a site for a job. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but there are shared flight plans available to help you quickly get started, and you can build upon what others have created and share those flight plans with the community. Everything is instruction based, so you can tell the drone exactly what you want it to do, and there are very granular controls down to specific advanced camera settings and variable flight parameters. It’s really nothing short of amazing what you can do, if you put it good use!