Bandwagon's Drones Thread

I try to be prepared and keep boxes of every screw handy, since it's way cheaper to order online.....but fuck waiting for something you need right now.

You don't have hardware stores where you live?

In this video?

The first shot was with the Yuneec Q500 in "Follow Me" mode. I was controlling the panning to the right with a very gentle and steady right nudge on the right stick....while driving, lol. Nothing to do with skill there, I have a shit ton of crappy and shaky shots, this one just turned out decent.

edit: had these reversed. Fixed now.
The second shot of the house is with the Solo using the "Cable Cam" smart shot, which is fucking amazing. If I haven't had so many issues with the Gopro+gimbal, I'd recommend the solo to everyone for videography. Cable Cam really is amazing, and borderline required IMO. It's just too bad that the integration of hardware on the solo is such a shit show. The DJI drones really feel like they were built from the ground up as one unit. The solo stuff can be *kind of* a headache, but it's really not too bad. The biggest problem has been the piece of shit GoPro 4s. I will never, ever, ever buy another GoPro product.

The 3rd shot of the windmills was the Solo in "Follow Me" mode, no hands on controls at all. It was still pretty shaky, but Premier's Warp Stabilizer fixed most of it.


I would say "you'll get there", but I can't reliably get steady, panning shots with manual control either. The best shots I've gotten are a combination of Solo's SmartShots and a lot of editing in Adobe Premiere, which I'm just barely scratching the surface of. Just like with mapping, I think the best results come from programming in a flight plan and letting the drone interpolate between points.

Haha, I understand.

Just remember with "FollowMe", the drones (nowadays) maintain an absolute altitude, not an altitude above current ground level or above the controller. Don't fly into a hillside that you're driving up.

Pix4d dropped support for direct upload to Mapbox with version 2.2, which kind of sucks. I still don't know how to prep the alpha channel before uploading to Mapbox, so uploading from Pix4d was my lazy way of getting rid of the black box around maps.

They're doing a lot of work on adding tools and functionality, which is awesome. Some small features that make a big difference, like flattening planar surfaces that don't process with great results.

The release notes for the upcoming version 3.0 say that Step. 2 will be 2x as fast without any change in the quality of results, which is fucking amazing. Pix4D already blows photoscan out of the water with speed.


I went back to the WWR Dike yesterday and flew the Rededge. I really just went over there to have a beer with a friend, but thought I'd try the RE3 out here and see if we can ID some plants from 400ft with this camera. Just fucking around on this one, nothing new/spectacular. This is the NIR band only.
Video is below, and here is the map on Atlas.

Some new products

Lehmann Aviation LA Series - Possibly the eBee killer. $7k for the RTK model.

eBee SQ - New eBee with Sequoia. $11,000 instead of $17,500-$22,000

Parrot Disco - I want one of these.

Picasso3 said:

Where da lidar at

Click to expand...

Affordable options are coming-
Velodyne LiDAR

Quanergy | Future of Mapping and Navigation

Or, if you want to spend $250,000 now...
RIEGL - RIEGL RiCOPTER VUX-SYS

Three 3Drobotics developers (that I know of, talk on facebook) have left 3dr in the last week. Not sure if there are more I don't know of.

Just found out 10 minutes ago that Colin Guinn & team were sacked yesterday. Announcement supposed to happen next week at interdrone, including something new from Colin. "Think uber".


The uber comment was kinda "meh" to me, but Colin getting sacked is a damn strong sign that 3DR is circling the drain.

.

Just decided to go to Interdrone in Vegas this week. I got the $75 ticket, but Nolan @ Mapir.camera said I can use his conference pass if any of them interest me.

P Picasso3 & Vepil - See ya there, right?

"my water just broke" is not a good enough reason to miss a nerd convention.

Got a sneak peak of some new cameras that I'll get to alpha test.






And this one has the logo on it, so please don't share until after next week (for the 3 of you that view this thread)

"Discrete Spectral Bands".

Basically, it's better to have each sensor look at a very specific spot on the EM spectrum and then compare them, instead of having one sensor that picks up light in multiple areas of the spectrum.

A more controlled environment.

Just got back from this. Couldn't see shit when it got to the fire line and ended up jumping it, was doing about 30mph. Sure would have been nice to have a view from the air through all that smoke.


This is after it calmed down a bit and we were letting it burn out at the road.