DJI M2E Advanced: Drone Configuration with DJI Pilot app

Owned by Julia
Last updated: Oct 24, 2024 by Doga Viala
4 min read

The following settings are mandatory to successfully carry out Survey measurements in CSP plants and must also be considered before doing the camera calibration.

The DJI handbook for the M2E Advanced can be found here.

If you are using Litchi

to perform flights, you will need to make all adjustments as described here in the DJI Pilot app. Litchi cannot be used to set any parameters!

Memory Cards

Only new SD cards may be used (depending on the number of recordings, ~0.5years to 1 year max).

Older SD cards may cause errors in the IR videos and the corresponding flights might have to be redone.

Only use the memory cards mentioned here:

  • SanDisk Extreme 128GB V30 microSDXC

  • SanDisk Extreme Pro 128GB V30 microSDXC

Using a different memory card with produce erroneous videos and data evaluation by Volateq will not be possible.

Check the controller's date and time settings. If they are incorrect, the videos will also be saved with incorrect metadata, making it difficult to assign the videos to the correct operational state and to merge drone videos and solar field operational data.

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access controller settings
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go to date & time

DJI Pilot App: basic settings and pre-flight check   

  • Start by turning on the drone and the controller.  

  • Open the DJI Pilot App and log into your DJI user account.  

 

  • After rejecting or updating the software updates (firmware updates may take up to 1 hour, so do not update the firmware short before scheduled flights), we see the main screen an choose manual flight to get to the settings menu   

  • Set “Return to Home Altitude” to the highest building of the plant (e.g. cooling tower, electrical transmission lines) plus an offset of at least 20 m.

  • Make sure only the in section 1 mentioned SD card is used and there is enough free memory on the SD card (approximately 25 GB per flight required)

Visual camera video settings: 

  • Make sure that the button is set to camera to grab videos

  • Access the settings below the menu on the right side of the screen

  • Set the exposure correction value (EV) to –1.7. Other parameters are shown, but are not changeable or do not need to be adapted.

Visual camera video size must be set to 4K:

The simplest solution is to protect both wheels on the front of the controller with tape, to avoid accidentally touching the wheels and altering gimbal tilt and/or zoom:

  • Timestamp: OFF

  • Video caption: ON (very important, that way the drone meta data is stored in .srt file format. This information is indispensable for data processing)

 

Infrared Camera Settings:

  • Auto FFC: ON (very important for IR data quality!)

  • Gain Mode:

    • for Photovoltaics (PV): High (because we relatively narrow temperature from usually 30°C to 90°C)

    • for Concentrated Solar Power (CSP): Low (because we have a wide temperature range from 40°C up to 200°C) 

  • Storage location must be the SD card, with a capacity of at least 128 GB! 

 

  • No isotherms are available for the DJI Mavic 2 Enterprise Advanced.

  • Choose “WhiteHot“ as color

Flight controller settings 

  • Put the Maximum Altitude to a value of 10 meters above the maximum altitude of the highest way point.

  • The same applies to the maximum flight distance. Please adapt the value to the distance between starting point and the outermost way points.

  • “Smart Return to Home” is strongly recommended in combination with the default threshold limits.