Bandwagon's Drones Thread

Utah DOT giving a talk, funny side story-
They have a howitzer that they use to trigger avalanches. During one of their uses, someone accidentily put an extra charge in and the shell went over the top of the mountain and detonated in someone's back yard.



Shell shocked: Errant avalanche bomb rips Pleasant Grove home

Best session so far was an update on the FAA Pathfinder program this afternoon

Marke "Hoot" @ FAA - fucking awesome guy, and I credit him for all of the changes we've seen from the faa in the last two years. I got to talk to him for awhile after the session and he's a former 2-star that was at the Pentagon. He strikes me as a no-bullshit blue collar sort of guy and definitely one of my favorite people I got to meet here.

Todd @ BNSF railway - By far the most impressive UAS development and implementation I've seen in the civilian world. I don't think I can due their program justice trying to describe it on my phone. I knew they were doing some cool stuff in the pathfinder program....I had no idea how advanced they were. I talked to Todd real quick just to compliment him on what they're doing and how beneficial it is to the rest of us, hoping we can connect in the future. Awesome stuff, and I think he said they're about to launch phase 3 of their implementation and go from about 1k miles of track to nationwode deployment within a few months.

[Can't remember her name], "statistical physicist" @ PrecisionHawk - not a fan of the company itself, but this lady was fucking awesome. She's basically generating risk analysis case studies for UAS operarions to provide regulators with real-world data for developing policy.

CNN - Mainly talking about the difficulty in getting authorization to fly over people, and how the images they gathered during Irma help tp show the public the benefit of drones.


We also got invited to a small private event at a penthouse (was actually weird, didn't know that was a thing at shows) where we got to see what's coming down the pipes for LAANC, as well as Verizon's entrance into the market with 4g for telemetry and UTM, and 5g coming down the pipes for 4k streaming and in-flight data transfers/uploads.

Choo choo, motherfuckers. Full speed ahead.

Good choices, glad you made the switch.
I made the switch to ipads about 6 months ago and it's been much better not dealing with the bullshit connection issues like android.
If you ever want to use drone deploy for flying, it needs a higher end tablet.

It's been working out really well having me do the planning and the field guys just launch the mission i made. [I just got in a fight in the parking lot while typing this. Fucking vagrants].

Anyways, if your son is interested you can have him give me a call. I can set up a few missions for him until he gets it going himself.

One of the other offices is in a local system a lot of the time. They've been tying some control in both state plane and local, then moving my files into the local system after. Seems pretty painless and they're still requesting it more and more.

Yea, I feel sorry foe the people doing this on your side of the country. Tons of controlled airspace over there. That "problem" should be solved really soon, though. LAANC is already rolling out at 5 airports in November.

Getting flooded with requests for volume calcs the last 3 weeks or so. 4 new clients, 5 more proposals in the works.

These guys were frustrated with the turnaround time and cost of a manned aircraft provider. I guess they've been waiting 7 weeks for a flight. Took us about 3 days from first contact to first flight (very easy people to deal with), and first imagery back to them in under 12 hours. Volume calcs in under 36 hours.

Www.pbsenv.com/uas/rivergate

tyen

Beyond Scanning: Recreating a Scandinavian Forest with Photogrammetry and Substance

I'm on a mountain.

Dronedeploy bug is forcing the image size to 16:9 instead lf 4:3. This means I can't use our calibrated camera profile and it fucked up 4 of my flights from thursday last week, which were 3 hours away.

Getting really tired of the bugs that DD introduces every other week. Last time, the focus was being set when aimed at the horizon before pointing nadir.

I'm flying our camera calibration course right now to see if i can fix it and make a new profile. Otherwise, I have to drive back and fly them with the ebee.

Guy Pierce voiced a 10 minute short film about a drone that wins Person of the Year in 2022.

I've been spending a ton of time trying to learn ESRI products and see what I can do with ArcGIS online. There's plenty I don't like about Esri (especially their licensing), but there's SO MUCH that we can do with it. I mainly just wanted a centralized database for all of my orthophotos so that our project managers can see what's already available and then download as needed, but we've found a thousand other uses for it in the process and we're essentially starting to build our own internal GIS now. Loving this stuff.

I can't share the main map that I've been working on, but I've put a ridiculous amount of data into it. We have all of the projects from the last 13 years from 3 of the groups, and I just got all of our survey PDFs imported and available for download, searchable by name or township/range/section ( Vepil ).

There's not a ton of info in THIS map, but it's an example I put together yesterday to pitch to a few vineyard owners. Very well-received so far. I'm hoping that if these maps have enough use internally and if I'm able to sell enough of them to clients, we can justify hiring a GIS-P with enterprise experience. I like working through this stuff and learning on my own as I go, but I'm afraid of getting 100+ hours deep into setting these systems up only to find out that I made a mistake due to inexperience.


Here's some screenshots of the bigger map I'm working on.