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Be extremely cautious when in follow me mode

Shogun182

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Hey all just checking in to tell you a little about my two different experiences the last two days with follow me mode. Both times ended the same, not ideal to say the least. After flying for about half the battery in follow me mode while I rode my 4 wheeler which I should say it did follow me and kept up well, the problem occurs when I'm done and exit out of the follow me mode. Once ending follow me mode the drone paused for about 5 seconds and up pops "going home" even though both times I had the home point set to "me". So it starts rising up to my rth altitude and heads off in the direction I originally took off from probably over a mile away. It would not let me cancel the go home on my controller so I hit pause, after hitting pause it just hovered not responding to anything I was trying with the joy sticks. If you unpause it continued to head to that original home point. Long story longer I had to pause and hit auto land, the first time I was able to run over and hand catch it to land but the second time it came down full speed, I was in position to hand catch it safely but it had no sign of slowing down and landed as it hit the ground at full speed. Luckily the props took the brunt of the damage. Just a warning to be very careful and maybe expect this situation to happen in follow me mode if you want to land somewhere other than the original take off point.
 
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Yikes; not good! You should call Autel and relay that to them; see if they have a solution. (A solution that *isn't* "Well, the new firmware is coming soon...")
 
I did contact them before I wrote this whole thing up, I still don't understand why it wanted to go a mile away to go home when I was directly underneath it and had the homepoint set to "me". I'll paste the reply I got from Tim at Autel...
Thank you for the update. So setting the home point to yourself is not dynamic. It just sets it to where you currently are. If you change locations you will need to reset the home point to where you have re-located. So it sounds like after the follow me, it either thought it needed all of the remaining battery power to return to where you set the home point originally or it had lost signal.
 
Oh; interesting. I think all of us would assume that setting the home point to "me" would make the controller the home point at all times, no matter where the controller happened to wander to. Seems to me that having to reset the homepoint to our present location whenever we move is a bug.

Thanks for the head's up!
 
I agree which is why I told Tim and really meant it, I'm not going to use the follow me mode anymore unless I plan on looping back around and ending exactly where I took off from.
 
Do you think it would have been possible to hit pause at that point, then reset the home location to the controller again, and then hit go to home? It is difficult "discovering" all these quirks in operation.

Cheers,

Dan K.
 

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