Hello, fellow drone meisters. My dabbling continues apace with the dark art of flying grid mapping missions using Litchi with my older Mavics to create a 2D ortho-mosaic image by later" stitching together" all the photographs taken at 5-second intervals along the drone’s “lawn mower flight path.”
To keep the waypoint count down below 98, I am trying to find a way to batch-delete all waypoints EXCEPT those that lie at the ends of each lawn-mower pass of the drone, at the point where the drone makes an about turn to fly in the opposite direction. I found that by simply batch-deleting waypoints, without having a means to set those end-point waypoints as “read only” so that they are not allowed to scoot over to “fill the gaps” that appear as I batch-delete non-essential waypoints, that shifting of waypointws as I delete others has the effect of deforming the flight path at those end-points, which I would rather did not happen.
So, my question is whether any of Litchi’s more experienced users can describe the steps needed to fix specific Litchi waypoints at their current GPS location, as a prelude to deleting numerous other non-essential waypoints that lie along the flight path between the end-points of each lawn mower pass of the drone. Any advice that can be offered in this regard would be greatly appreciated. As a footnote, I plan all my Litchi missions on the Litchi Flight Hub, and never on a mobile device. Thanks in advance for any pointers that can be offered.
First, save your mission as a different name, to have a backup.
Select one waypoint.
Hold CTRL key and select another waypoint.
Click ‘SELECT ALL’.
While holding the CTRL key, click the waypoints that you want to keep. It will 'de-select them.
Click the garbage can to delete all that are still selected.
This idea that I’d never have discovered without your kind advice, has now worked like a charm, Sam_G.
I must add one minor point of correction now that I followed the steps you kindly provided above. The final step of selecting the end-point waypoints that I don’t wish to delete only worked on my computer when I clicked on the waypoints to be retained without holding down the Ctrl key as I clicked on them in turn. With that small deviation from the above steps, the waypoint count dropped from over 200 to just 45 waypoints, while the flight path remained intact and unchanged in appearance.
Thanks to your wealth of knowledge so generously shared, I will send my Mavic 2 Pro on its first ever mapping mission today. This is a crucially important mapping mission that I am running for the first time, and I cannot tell you how grateful I am for this insight you have taken the time to outline here.
Long live the Litchi forum and all its contributors!
I found that in deselecting the waypoints to be retained, I had to click on them at a deliberately slow pace, and wait each time for the de-selection process to complete as indicated when the green ( selected) color of the waypoint reverts to the blue (de-selected) color.
On my ancient desktop computer, there is a short two-second delay after I click to deselect any given waypoint, before its color reverts from green to blue. When I tried to hurry the de-selection process, I noticed that all the waypoints would deselect and turn green to blue, but when I slowed down the pace of deselecting the waypoints to be retained, the process worked flawlessly every time.
I added this footnote in case anyone else uses Litchi on a museum piece desktop computer as I do. Once again, I thank you kindly, Sam_G, for saving me hours of haphazard trial and error bumbling here.
If you are still using Ancient.land, wouldn’t it be easier to use the “Zcheck” slider to prevent those intermediate waypoints from being created in the first place?
This is the first mention of the Zcheck slider that I have encountered thus far, Wes.
I still have lots of homework to do before I can lay claim to a discernible level of competence in drone mapping, but I do get a kick out of exploring the capabilities of these amazing flying machines, even though purists might consider my lowly Mavic 2 Pro an obsolete design, which might be true in some regards.
This timely mention of the Zcheck slider is appreciated and valued as a potential time saver.