I want to talk a little about trust. This relates to so many aspects of dealing with tweaked software, dealing with DJI, dealing with copy-cats who steal other people's work. Can we trust DJI? Can we trust the people making these mods? Can we trust people in other groups?
DJI makes some pretty good products, which are used by consumers, hobbyists, and commercial operators. DJI made changes to their systems, which introduced hurdles that have impacted commercial operators. This has caused commercial impact to operators who are unable to fulfil contracts due to the changes made by DJI. As a result of the DJI new world order, many pilots have lost trust in DJI. This ultimately caused many people to start to reverse engineer DJI aircraft to bypass the new restrictions. The benefit we will eventually see will be completely community built set of replacement code that will be able to replace DJI software, which will allow operators to use their aircraft to meet their needs.
The team that has been working on this project has started to use the name “OG”, or “Original Gangsters”. But before you panic, these Gangsters can be trusted. The community of people that are reverse engineering DJI products are generally pretty awesome. If this was a commercial project, the engineering capabilities that they are giving away freely would be worth significant sums of money. All of this work is being shared publicly on Github. This allows peer review by other developers to peek under the hood, to make sure that what is being created is safe. Equally importantly, there are contributors who are testing these modifications to ensure safety for everyone.
However, not everyone is OG material. There are other people who have taken this public material, and putting their logo on it. They then share this in other forums trying to be superstars claiming things as their own work. Czokie for example was kicked out of another forum for challenging this behaviour. The act of taking someone else's work and publishing it as your own without crediting the authors is unacceptable. OK. They did do something to change the app. They changed some splash screen graphics. But essentially, not their work..
I have some advice to those reading this page. If you look at the pages linked from this wiki, they are the “OG”, the “Original Gangsters”. They are the people that are creating mods and patches. They respect other people who's work they depend on, and credit that work in their GIT repositories. This code is peer reviewed and the people who participate here are testing patches and tweaks to help make the resulting code safer for everyone.
But, remember. These tweaks are provided with no warranty. Make sure you read supporting material and/or code, and understand what you are doing. If you dont understand and it breaks your equipment, you get to keep both pieces.
If DJI had not implemented their NFZ (No Fly Zone), this would never have happened in more ways than one. Firstly, it is that red tape that got many people frustrated with DJI. But even more amusing is the fact that it is the very process of updating the NFZ database that was exploited to get root access to the aircraft.
I think it is fair to say that this whole community started as a result of a lack of trust in DJI, as a direct result of the red tape they have introduced. Yes, we all want safety. But this is a little too far. Owners have purchased aircraft with certain capabilities. DJI made changes which caused licensed pilots who have permission to fly in certain areas need to jump through hoops that were not required when they purchased their aircraft. Particularly outside the USA, this process of sending email messages and waiting causes overhead and additional cost to DJI pilots. This caused a lack of trust in DJI, which spurred on these efforts. In the future, I think the end conclusion will be a 100% open source replacement for everything that is currently provided by DJI in the form of software/firmware.