Bandwagon's Drones Thread

Intrinsic said:

Is there a controller that can be used for drone simulators on PC that can then be used for an actual drone? I know the answer is yes, after reading about the DJI controller and one or two others. Maybe the question is, if I'm getting one for my son to learn to fly on the PC, is there a version more universal so that I can turn around and buy him the $300 or whatever real drone to fly and use the same controller he learned?

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I honestly don't know. I've never used any of the simulator stuff. I'm making a guess (so double check me), but buying an old, used DJI controller from something like a Mavic 2 or Mavic 3 Classic is probably the cheapest route. It's not going to work with the newer drones though. If that's a goal, just get the new drone.

I have some old Phantom 4 Pro controllers I could send you, from crashed drones. If you send me a call tag. Don't know if those work with the simulator though, and they're bulky monsters compared to the newer stuff.

In other news, I just finished processing this fucking monster. What an absolute unit.

· 3,327 Acres
· 24,783 Photos ( 497GB )
· 24x GCPs
· 76 Checkpoints
· GSD: 0.051ft

Took me over 4 weeks to get to this point. Flying big sites sucks in the winter. Not much daylight. Then I wasted almost 3 weeks troubleshooting bad a/t, only to discover that my PPK software has a massive bug that's matching the wrong coordinates to the wrong photos.

Intrinsic said:

Yeah, a DJI FPV Controller 2 is only like $190 and should work or the Mini 3 / Mavic one is like $250. He's only 6 but I think he'd enjoy learning on the computer.

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Ahh, the phantom controllers are probably going to be too big for him, then. I don't think I have any extras of the small controllers.

I think that the Mavic 2 & (orig) Mavic Mini controllers are the smallest ones I can think of. The Mavic 2 controller I have in the office is fucking tiny and I hate it. Probably perfect for a 6yo.

DJI drones are hard to crash these days. You almost have to be trying to do it. I let an 8 year old fly mine and she had no trouble with it. I made her keep it above tree level but honestly I am pretty sure she could have brought it home and landed it if I had told her how.

Kajiimagi said:

Funny my DJI drone 1st flight was to fly right into a power line in my backyard. It flipped broke apart in the air and crashed. It was one of the few days we'd actually had rain here so when I found it I not only had to replace the blades / guards but also clean mud out of the motor. Still flys today though. It's one of the smaller ones , not sure of exact model.

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Did it have collision sensors on it? I actually saw a dude fly a non-DJI drone into a power line once too, which is funny because I think it would be fairly hard to do if you tried to do it on purpose.

I've been playing around with "FlightHub2" again. They finally added support for mapping missions so I have a field guy trying it out today with one of the newer drones.

I really like the interface for planning waypoint photos though. Makes it easy for me to import a CAD file and plan construction site photos this early in the project. I'll plan them based off this CAD file, then shouldn't have to change the mission anymore afterwards. I'll just have someone stop by once a month and collect the same photos.

I'm mainly working on learning this so that I'm ready to use the autonomous docks as soon as we get one.


I set that mission up while my field guy was driving to the project site. Now I'm watching him fly it from the other side of the state.

Bandwagon said:

I've been playing around with "FlightHub2" again.

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Is that a piece of standalone software or part of some larger suite?

Part of the DJI ecosystem I guess

Bandwagon said:

I've been playing around with "FlightHub2" again. They finally added support for mapping missions so I have a field guy trying it out today with one of the newer drones.

I really like the interface for planning waypoint photos though. Makes it easy for me to import a CAD file and plan construction site photos this early in the project. I'll plan them based off this CAD file, then shouldn't have to change the mission anymore afterwards. I'll just have someone stop by once a month and collect the same photos.

I'm mainly working on learning this so that I'm ready to use the autonomous docks as soon as we get one.
View attachment 519727

I set that mission up while my field guy was driving to the project site. Now I'm watching him fly it from the other side of the state.
View attachment 519731

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Screenshot showing the planned/estimated photo vs the actual captured photo. I'm pretty damn happy with this.

"Site photos" is one of the most annoying requests for me. Sometimes the requestor has VERY specific instructions on how they want the picture to look, if it's for something like a trade publication, award, or cover photo for a big proposal. It can be tough to plan some of these remotely when they're so specific, and it's also tough to just rely on the UAS operators I use. Some are great with detailed instructions, others aren't. I came up with my own process for doing this type of thing, which involved setting up a custom camera in Google Earth and planning captures there first, then importing it into my flight plan software. I only use that workflow when I get very specific photo capture requests because it takes quite a bit longer to plan a flight that way.

This stuff probably would have taken me about 2 hours to plan out using my own workflow, but it took me less than 15 minutes to do it this new way, for the first time. It's also aligned with the planned photos a little better than mine normally are (but in my defense, that's normally with prosumer GNSS drones and this one is a newer enterprise RTK drone).

Fire Department's old training tower. Pretty dang clean 3d model. The red one is the new training tower. I'm still working on that one.