Bandwagon's Drones Thread

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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The IDD event was a blast! We easily had 400-500 people show up during the course of it. So much positive feedback! I have an appointment in 2 weeks with the local fire department to do a show and tell, they are seriously interested in what drones can do to help keep personnel accounted for and safe during an emergency. The VDOA rep could not have been more pleased. Our flight field was at the end of the runway about 100 feet to the side. There was a steady stream of Cessnas and the like taking off all day long while our drones were in the air. Seriously cool! The airport manager could not have been more accommodating. With multiple spotters and ground radios on the aviation freqs we could hear the pilots talking about how cool it was to take off while being filmed from the air. Major success!
That's a pretty huge turnout. Nice work!
Any crashes? Were people doing FPV racing or anything?
 

Lenardo

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showed my boss my initial half "quick view" you get from pix3d cloud process flyover of my house's topo in 3d,... even that quick half processed., it had the slope of my yard represented well, the 3' retaining wall in my & my neighbor's yard, could even see the 6" curb line bump up from the road.

his reply....... nice, put the invoice on carol's desk.
score- 100% reinbursement.

i am attempting to find a decent program that works with my asus zen10 tablet... pix4dcapture does not work well(keeps crashing when i try to get to set up the mission). i haven't tried drone deploy yet(on the asus- it looked like it was going to work on my nexus5 but the drone crashed on takeoff (i was not hovering)) and saw tower on 3dr's site and am going to give that a try-provided it works.

tower looks to work on my tablet, no idea how to make tower work(looking for it) with the P3A drone...

interestingly enough i ALMOST got mission setup to run with pix4dcapture on the asus just now, got past the tutorial...but it still crashes... :/

dronedeploy crashes on my asus tablet also...cannot even get beyond the sync screen :/ the main dji software works fine

i am going to try my old 7" nook tablet next- just have to find the thing, it still worked, my nookhd tablet just one day up and died(won't boot at all) my tab2 nook doesn't give me the box to draw the flight path...i am also going to install the software on my bosses iphone. edit: tried my old smartphone (work phone) its an lg something or other- runs android 4.1.2..... pix4dcapture ran perfectly, go figure.....
 

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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Yea, tower won't work with DJI drones.

I've heard people mention some other apps for DJI, not sure I remember what they are. MapsMadeEasy has an app, I think.
 

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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I'll see if I can find the thread that had a lot of good feedback on apps for the phantom. Can't remember where it was, though.

A solid tablet is worth it's weight in gold when doing this stuff, though. Might be time for an upgrade.
wink.png
 

Lenardo

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ROFL. I have yet to INSTALL the software and just have the quick thing done by the cloud.


gpsreport.pdf - Google Drive

that is the quality report from "half" project. uploading the full version instead of the quick to see what- if anything- is different.

i am at work and have like 5 projects that "i need now!!!!" (from the clients)


installed the software but didn't activate the full blown version yet.. just "discovery" running now.... its doing the ray cloud thingy now...
 

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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It should be a little bit better with full processing instead of rapid, but that number for Camera Optimization (42.69%) is going to be a big problem if you're going for XYZ accuracy. I'm really surprised at that number, since Pix4D is doing a lot of work on making it work well with DJI. Which phantom version are you flying again?
Ideally, you want that number to be less than 1%, but I'm usually happy with <3%.

Looks like your RMS error is about 4m as well, which is about what was expected.
Getting your camera calibrated should be your priority, but either way....nice fucking work getting a map to stitch (with all images enabled) on your first try! I know it's pretty easy now with the Phantoms, but that's still a damn good result for the first test.
Looking forward to seeing more from ya, man.
 

Kais

<Gold Donor>
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Band, we had an alternating schedule between photo setups and racers. They had a nice course setup with a couple gates and pylons. 4 racers showed but turned out only 2 were AMA members and so were the only ones allowed to demo (insurance reasons). We had a large tv setup to a groundlink station and we coordinated frequencies so that the audience could see what the drones saw. The guys who weren't flying were kind enough to let people try on their fatshark goggles too. For the photo demos side we had my 550, an Inspire 1, Phantom 3 and 4, 3DR solo, and a couple 350-450 scratch built quads. Our S900 pilot's daughter went into labor that morning so he had to bow out. Throw in a couple Yuneec's, Blade 350's and nanos, and some others i can't remember our club brought out like 20 different drones for folks to see.
 

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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Sounds like you guys did a cool show & tell for the people that aren't involved. The live feed from the FPV racers was probably awesome for them to see.
 

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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I love the Solo for mapping in general, but it's really pissing me off any time I have to use the Gimbal + GoPro.

I might end up getting a phantom just for the general aerial photography and videography stuff.

edit: Lenardo, which Phantom are you using?
 

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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Gotcha.

After finishing step 1., go back into your image properties editor and edit the camera, then click "Load optimized parameters", and process step one again. Should bring your relative difference between camera parameters to less than 5%.
 

Lenardo

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ok lets see what happens with optimized.... running now as i do 3 different plans for submission for tomorrow....

knocked it down to 10%. still running. and of course i had a client come in to work on his plans- that no-one told me about..or my boss. we gave him to our civil engineering grad student/employee (he is full time and is going for his masters in CE)


for some reason the picture alignment is not right- if you look at the animation looks like they are at 90 not the 45 i requested. that said, the topo itself...worked great the elevations given- except for the cars and bushes are-accurate within a few inches compared to the topo i did about 8 years ago when i built the wall in the back.

just would have to adjust the datum i used and the contours every foot would be slightly more accurate than what i came up with back then.

not doing 45 degrees is probably why there is the hole in back- it is decently wooded but seeing top down branches block a lot of the area.

i changed like 3 settings, and there are significantly more points this time around...last time was around 2 million points inserted.

this time- it is still running- i am at 6.6 million and am only half done....
 

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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The hole in the back is just from the trees. They're closer to your drone during flight, so less overlap. Also, any wind in the canopy during the flight can make it really hard to stitch canopies.

You can use the same pictures and combine them with another flight over the same area at 400ft. Try it in a different direction/heading angle.
 

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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I actually just learned the part about loading optimized parameters after initial processing is done. I've done it before, but I never knew that you could do it over and over again until the relative difference is <1%.

I only found that out because there is a bug that makes you time out while trying to upload projects to the cloud, and that is how Pix4D wants you to upload images so they can create new camera profiles. I've been waiting a week to get a camera profile for this GoPro4 with the 3.97mm lens and just wanted to make it myself.

First tests were 40-80%. Got it down to 0.2% and it looks waaaaaaay better. I know I have some old projects with the S100 that were around 15-20%, now I kind of want to go back and reprocess them and see how they look.
 

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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Without a doubt. You can go back through the last 20 pages and see that.
wink.png


I spend so much time reading the Pix4D knowledge base while sitting in lobbies and Safeway checkout lines.