The mission is stored on the aircraft when you upload it. When tower crashes just close it, reopen, connect, and download the mission from the Solo. It will keep flying what it was last told to do unless you change that. I just leave it going and once reconnected Tower will pickup from there and you can monitor again.
Iv been using Solex Missions a bit and helping Kelly get a few things working better. It's all good now. Main thing I like at this point is the terrain following.
Thanks for these ideas. We're going to test things out this next week, as otherwise Tower is working fine for us.
But we're also going to give Solex + Missions a try, since it's currently supported. Most are our flights are with a MicaSense RedEdge 5-band camera, and I have the camera parameters, etc. We use a grid survey for this, and I've mostly liked the way Tower does this. In Solex/Missions I got confused initially by the Grid option, but what we want is the Survey type, which lets you choose the camera (MicaSense isn't listed, but we can use a different 48 deg FOV). I like the ability of choosing the grid angle; that will help a lot.
We'll test this out at our limited test area this week to see how it works in an actual mission, but here are the observations so far:
Similar capabilities to Tower:
1. Ability to create gridded survey missions, based on the camera FOV and altitude.
2. Ability to cache image maps for planning missions away from the internet. With Solex/Missions, seems to work more like Pix4Dcapture, where images are saved with corresponding missions.
3. Ability to download missions from aircraft, as a check to see what it has loaded. Have to press the Options in the Layers view to see this option.
Advantages of Solex/Missions related to Tower:
1. Ability to set the angle of the survey grid.
2. Terrain following (haven't tested, but would love this to work).
Bugs of Tower:
1. Random crashes during mission planning or during a flight.
Bugs of Solex/Missions (on Nexus 9 at least):
1. Entering a survey, message displays "Oops, not a survey" -- fixed if careful by redoing.
So far, so good for the most part.