So, as you may have noticed, it’s now March which means our February release date for the Mavic 2 has slipped. We're very sorry for this, but we have good reasons for it.
The group of people who contributed the M2 hack and claimed the bounty have been working with us to integrate this into NLD. However, these are real people with real actual jobs and lives, in both cases, real life has gotten in the way of this project. It’s still 100% going ahead, but without the help from the external contributors, it simply isn’t possible to get this implemented. To save future disappointment, we’re not going to mention a release date again, but just keep your eyes out.
NLD V1.9 should be released within the next few days, it’s in the final build stages and testing. The headline changes here are primarily bug fixes, with a HUGE amount of effort gone into the firmware detection and flashing system. We’re hoping to completely remove all bugs in the system, so it can always detect your firmware and get rid of the annoying “Phase” loop where it can say “Phase 59” or whatever during downgrades (for reference, there should only be 2 phases!) We have also put in some work on the latest Spark and Mavic firmware’s so the crashing bugs on these firmware’s should be resolved too.
In the meantime, well, what comes after 1.9? That’s right, 2.0. We haven’t been resting on our laurels with 2.0. We have been working to completely replace DJI assistant 2, even the cut-down bundles core dependencies that we currently use will be removed, we will be talking to the drone in its "native" language which means no more weird COM port issues and less issues overall as there isn’t a middleman in-between NLD and your drone. We have some very early test builds running internally and have all the communication aspect working well.
The reason for this change isn’t just because we wanted something to do, but it helps us lay out a good framework for future growth. If all NLD does is send DUML (drone language) commands to the drone, it means we lose Assistant 2, but we gain simplicity. This opens the door to running the NLD framework on other platforms than Windows (were talking, Mac, tablets and phones, all running what was NLD Desktop) as all the heavy lifting can be done by the NLD server, the client side of things essentially becomes an interface full of dumb buttons, made "smart" by the server! This is a little way off, but it’s a wholesale change in the way NLD works, so it’s important to lay good foundations.
So that’s the end of this blog post, some good news, some bad, but we hope you understand the delays.
As a side note, please go to our Q&A blog post and get some questions answered :)
https://nolimitdronez.com/nld-qa-session#comments
/All at the NLD Team