- Joined
- May 5, 2015
- Messages
- 856
- Reaction score
- 666
As many of you know the Solo comes with a fly-away warranty, of note is that the warranty is not limited to the 12 month time frame of the manufacturing warranty, there is one caveat that won't be an issue for most users but it's worth understanding nonetheless. 3DR are working on the exact legal wording but a developer has posted a rough interpretation to elaborate on a Tweet 3DR sent earlier in the week, I'll try and explain.
The Solo was designed from the ground up with video production as its primary task, obviously it's expandable beyond that with its design, but for day one, the Solo application is focused on video alone and a number of preset moves.
At this time the fly-away warranty is only applicable if you are flying with the Solo application, i.e. you're using the Solo for its intended task of making video.
Applications exist for the Pixhawk which can do more than just video tasks, i.e. they can do mapping tasks for agriculture or making 3D point clouds for industry and so on, these are performed by applications which have waypoint controls that are not yet present in the Solo application. If you use other applications to fly, such as Droid Planner, Tower, APM Planner, AndroPilot etc that will result in those flights NOT being covered by the fly-away warranty. Also using such applications to make changes to your Pixhawk parameters outside the Solo application will also put you at risk of invalidating this particular warranty, especially if you deliberately circumvent fail-safes.
The reasoning for this hasn't been explained in detail yet, but it's reasonable to assume this is because the other applications made by 3DR and third parties allow changes to be made that can themselves cause crashes should the user not be knowledgeable enough to understand the changes they are making, it may also be the case (though this is purely assumption) that the other applications may not keep local logs as complete as the Solo application does.
In the past on other Pixhawk copters, some users have used ground station software to turn off fail safes, then sent their copters on long range missions, so far out of range the telemetry and sometimes even the Tx or video signal are out of range and they wait for the copter to come back safety, obviously this comes with a much higher risk than conventional transmitter flying.
3DR have said they will be regularly updating the Solo application, so they will be adding new video moves and additional functionality, so rather than risk using other applications it would be better to feedback to 3DR the kind of functionality you want to see added to the Solo application.
The Solo was designed from the ground up with video production as its primary task, obviously it's expandable beyond that with its design, but for day one, the Solo application is focused on video alone and a number of preset moves.
At this time the fly-away warranty is only applicable if you are flying with the Solo application, i.e. you're using the Solo for its intended task of making video.
Applications exist for the Pixhawk which can do more than just video tasks, i.e. they can do mapping tasks for agriculture or making 3D point clouds for industry and so on, these are performed by applications which have waypoint controls that are not yet present in the Solo application. If you use other applications to fly, such as Droid Planner, Tower, APM Planner, AndroPilot etc that will result in those flights NOT being covered by the fly-away warranty. Also using such applications to make changes to your Pixhawk parameters outside the Solo application will also put you at risk of invalidating this particular warranty, especially if you deliberately circumvent fail-safes.
The reasoning for this hasn't been explained in detail yet, but it's reasonable to assume this is because the other applications made by 3DR and third parties allow changes to be made that can themselves cause crashes should the user not be knowledgeable enough to understand the changes they are making, it may also be the case (though this is purely assumption) that the other applications may not keep local logs as complete as the Solo application does.
In the past on other Pixhawk copters, some users have used ground station software to turn off fail safes, then sent their copters on long range missions, so far out of range the telemetry and sometimes even the Tx or video signal are out of range and they wait for the copter to come back safety, obviously this comes with a much higher risk than conventional transmitter flying.
3DR have said they will be regularly updating the Solo application, so they will be adding new video moves and additional functionality, so rather than risk using other applications it would be better to feedback to 3DR the kind of functionality you want to see added to the Solo application.
Attachments
Last edited: