Bandwagon's Drones Thread

Aazrael said:

Just saw in one video about a gimbal flicking but it was the first I heard about it.

And yea I would buy a bigger drone if I could but they get a bit too pricey for me. If this is something I use a lot I might look into an upgrade in the future.

Not sure what climate you live in but have you used them in below freezing? At least on the "varmer" winter days one should be able to fly them without the battery freezing.

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I've flown in below freezing and over 100. Haven't ever had much of an issue in cold weather, other than the props icing up

I've gotten in the habit of adding my QA/QC results to my online GIS portal and tying them to my mapping boundaries polygon layer so I can summarize them in my UAS dashboard. I started using Metashape (in permanent free/trial mode) to estimate image quality and export to CSV after all the bullshit with the Phantom 4 Pro V2 camera issues. It takes me 5-10 minutes to use Arc Pro to append new data to these layers on each flight, so not a lot of extra time on each project to maintain this.


Comes in handy, too. For instance, I had this flight set up to run at 13mph and the pilot was supposed to keep the camera in shutter-priority at 1/800 for all of the mapping photos. This was a little red flag that popped up right as I was starting to do post-processing QA/QC and noticed that the SW portion of the project was a little bit fuzzier. Turns out it was a little pixel blur. The camera settings reset (back to auto) about 30% of the time when doing a battery swap, so they're supposed to re-check the camera settings after every flight.






A few other sites....

Pretty bad checkpoint deltas on this one. First flight for a competing surveying company and it turns out their field crew was taking checkshots in wheel ruts without a topo shoe (in a dirt field)



Stop & Shoot flight (instead of shooting on the move)




And Metashape image quality estimation...

I don't think I could solve that problem with how hard I'd be laughing

I hardly ever do videos so what do I know, but looks good to me. Gorgeous area.

I think I'm going to pick up one of these

Hey Vepil and L Lenardo - Are you guys slammed right now? We have 30 open positions and will end up opening 30 more once those get filled. Been trying to find a surveyor for almost 3 years now. The only good one that I found so far ended up moving back to North Dakota because he can't stand the politics in WA (LOL). I'm busier than I've ever been with drone stuff, but also stupid busy with the GIS sidework that I kind of invented for myself. Finally going to be interviewing candidates for a GIS position the week after next.

I'm getting 1-3 requests a day for UAS flights and about 1-4 calls a day about various GIS help requests or project work. AEC is full steam over here right now.

Vepil said:

We are slammed but are getting to be busier than we are comfortable with. I moved to a new company a few months ago so we have full drone and laser scanning capabilities. Since we do not market our company or services, 94% of our business is repeat clients we have started to move out into newer fields. We are working on BIM and full Revit models LOD 100 - 500 services for our clients and proposing to architects around the SE. I am also researching adding LiDAR to our drone for mapping some large solar projects, 2000 AC and up.

To be honest we probably could use another field crew, our utility client keeps two crews full time and are using one of our two private crews almost every day now. The RLS has been in the field for the last two weeks helping out to keep a huge scanning project of Hartsfield Jackson Airport going.

Our GIS team has a get this, a 10 year back log of work right now and were selected as finalists for a major FL contract that would be for 5 years. We have one client that told us under no circumstances is anyone else building their data centers and they plan 20 over the next 5 years. They also told us where they are planned and to open offices in those locations to support the data centers.

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What kind of jobs are you guys using the scanning on? Mainly for architects? We still don't have any clients that actually ask for point clouds or bim models, so it's basically up to us on whether we want to use them to get the linework.
How big is your new company?

Oh I didn't realize the firm was <1k people. Sounded like a large firm when I first read it.

It's aggravating that you guys have a gis department and I'm just now convincing them to start one. I cannot believe an environmental eng firm didn't have one 10 years ago and they'd still be 100% cad if i hadn't been obsessing over gis for the last 3 years. I think we'll be fine starting one internally with a key hire or two, but I've been recommending that we acquire a mobile lidar company for the last 2 years in the strategic planning meetings. All of the ones I see around here are small firms that cover a lot of ground in the field and have a handful of techs in the office to digitize. We have plenty of projects that could benefit from it, just not the expertise to draft with it efficiently. I think I've only recently realized how hard it is to find people that are interested in figuring any new shit out on their own. It's so damn obvious which people are passionate about work versus which ones are just "at work".

[Sorry, it took me about 6 tries to finish that because I kept having to put my phone down. Disjointed ramble....]