Apparently if the battery gets low, the drone will ascend to a preset altitude, fly back to its take off point, then descend to a landing. This is called low battery return to home (RTH) in the manual.

22% seems to be the point that triggers this and the 328’ altitude I set to get over the trees in Michigan is not compatible inside my pool cage in Florida.

What’s not in the manual is that once the RTH is triggered the drone’s obstacle avoidance system and inputs from the controller are ignored.

The pet screen on the cage held up fine as the drone tried to slice its way through and the drone then flew itself into the pavers next to the pool. Drone needs new rotors and maybe a plastic cover that holds an LED marker light at the end of one of the arms; might be called landing gear?

What is your insurance deductible?

Happened to me once. It drove itself right into a pine tree at about 50 feet. Luckily I only had to replace the props.

Had mine run out of battery completely and crash on top of a fence post.

Seems like it couldn't find any cinder blocks or running saws at the time

My only experience with one was some ass hole flying it over my neighborhood. It definitely had the camera on and ass hole was flying it over our back yards. His, like yours, went into low battery mode and landed. Luckily for me it landed in the alley behind my house. So I grabbed it, and held it hostage. I waited and looked at my monitor at my surveillance cameras. Ass hole shows up looking for his toy. I told him I have it but if you ever fly it over private residences, who have backyards, and we are not interested in giving up our privacy for your toy, I’ll blow it out of the sky. For all I know you are a pervert and are spying on kids playing.

I don’t know about other consumer drones, but even with the “telephoto” on mine, if it’s not within 25’ it isn’t picking up people in any detail. I was actually going to fly it past my neighbor’s backyard because I didn’t feel getting the boat out to go look. My wife wants to know how high their pool is in relation to the floor of the house. Unlike the rest of the neighbors across the street, he didn’t lose his pool due to erosion from the storm surge wave action during Helene and Milton.

We’re thinking about building a new house 12’ up and are wondering how to do the pool.

quote:

Originally posted by Prefontaine:
My only experience with one was some ass hole flying it over my neighborhood. It definitely had the camera on and ass hole was flying it over our back yards. His, like yours, went into low battery mode and landed. Luckily for me it landed in the alley behind my house. So I grabbed it, and held it hostage. I waited and looked at my monitor at my surveillance cameras. Ass hole shows up looking for his toy. I told him I have it but if you ever fly it over private residences, who have backyards, and we are not interested in giving up our privacy for your toy, I’ll blow it out of the sky. For all I know you are a pervert and are spying on kids playing.

Only one breaking any laws in this scenario you.

If you have a DJI you can cancel the auto return to home. I have my RTH height set pretty high because if you trigger a RTH the drone will go to a preset height and come home. If you happen to have something higher between you and the drone it will fly into it since, as you pointed out, it will ignore collision warnings when in RTH.

Yes, according to DJI, you have 10 seconds to cancel RTH. Unfortunately, I spent that entire time looking at my drone 10’ away trying to figure out why it suddenly stopped responding. I’m sure there was a message on the screen, but with the drone 10’ away in close quarters, I wasn’t looking there.

I had set the height in Michigan because of the trees, but it’s not a particularly useful feature if it crashes the drone into the trees on the way up.