so this happened last week and im still kind of annoyed about it. was about 40% through a fungicide application run and the bird just stopped spraying mid-swath, finished the autonomous path but with dry nozzles the whole rest of the way. no warning during the mission, just noticed the tank was way too full when i landed

pulled the logs and there's a flow sensor error that apparently triggered the pump shutoff but didn't abort the mission or give me any kind of alert on the ground station. i'd turned off some of the aggressive fault notifications because they were triggering on normal stuff and i guess that was dumb in hindsight

the bigger issue is i now have to figure out what got sprayed and what didn't because the coverage map in the app shows the full flight path as completed ? it doesn't distinguish between where product was actually dispensed. anyone know if there's a way to cross reference the pump telemetry with the flight log to reconstruct actual spray coverage? or am i just going back to ground truth this the hard way

yeah the coverage map thing is a known issue with a lot of these platforms, they log position not actual output which is a real problem when something goes wrong mid-mission. what platform are you running? if its DJI ag there's pump flow data buried in the.bin flight logs that you can pull with the assistant software, it's not surfaced anywhere obvious but its in there. you'd basically need to correlate timestamps between the flow dropout and the GPS track to figure out where the dry passes were

also definitely re-enable your fault alerts, i know they're noisy but a mid-mission spray failure is exactly the situation they exist for. some of the newer firmware lets you set thresholds so you're not getting dinged for minor pressure fluctuations

oof that's rough especially mid fungicide window when timing actually matters. we had a similar thing happen with a clogged nozzle that wasn't caught until we noticed the drift pattern was off on the next pass. ended up walking the field with a UV tracer application later just to see coverage, not practical at scale but it was the only way we could actually verify anything

honestly this is one of my bigger gripes with spraying drones vs manned ag aircraft ? the failure modes are less visible when you're watching from the ground. at least with a spray plane you can usually see the pattern in real time