Bandwagon's Drones Thread

that price, - i am assuming a typical field survey topo- not flown- by a survey crew- 1800 dollars - just for the topo survey work i'll assume

my work charges about 900-1000 dollars a day for field work.

funny story:

we just got one job(finished it now) and our project coordinator/boss gave this new client our typical price quote for the work in boston (typical W&S plan) of 2500 dollars to get an approved plan. and the guy goes, not gonna happen, so my boss thinking he is trying to negotiate the price, goes, well how much do you think it should cost,, the guy goes, it is not enough double it. my boss goes, well, ok if you insist. (apparently all the other quotes he got were more than triple our quote - pays to know what you are doing- we are one of only 2 firms allowed to submit plans electronically directly to bwsc (they just implemented it this past 2 months).

if the weather ever cooporates i will be flying 3 topos in the next couple of weeks now that the leaves are gone from the trees- one a partial asbuilt of a site to figure out exactly what the hell the client did, one for my personal edification for a project since it is - apparently- about to start and its 16 acres of relatively hilly ground, and the only topo we have for the majority of the site was flown over 20 years ago, and i would like one that was flown more recently and another asbuilt for a project that is finishing up and we want a finished grade topo(25 acres roughly).

notice that pix4d has a double pass option now for 3d topos "stock"

under 2 bills hmm parrot bebop is 199 on amazon gotta use a phone for controller though price doubles for the bebop with a controller,

controller
https://www.amazon.com/Parrot-Contr...rd_wg=xUEc7&psc=1&refRID=BEQ9TA579QBFTQ0F4YB5
bebop
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OOR9060/ref=twister_B0198875HA?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1

200 drone, 180 controller

Flew the 1st real project... and......ran out of power 90% thru and couldn't make it back to "home" in time

Crashed. in. the. woods. tablet had where GPS went down, hiked thru the woods and found it relatively easily


About 200 ft in broke 3 props, lost the battery, and broke the gimbal arm to the camera.... trying to fix gimbal now, & processing the 354 pictures to see how it came out- even at 90%done

Will find out tomorrow. I am going to jnsrall latest version on my work pc and run it there . pix4d has 4 options point cloud, mesh, orthomosaic , and dsm and processing log

process ran fine but i hit a bit of an issue where i am going to rerun the center- KEY - section, i had the core area i wanted to do the topo end up not getting processed(about 60 pictures or so) so that the area i really wanted to compare- is a black area about 12 acres in size. once i get the battery- and make sure it all runs right(due to crash), i'll refly it at a different elevation, camera angle, and overlap(will fly ~50 lower- increase overlap to 90% and angle will be 45) to hopefully enable the software to optimize and do the ray tracing to allow the key area to be topo'd ---the perimeter of the site looks fine - the center- the part i want- needs more.

120 acres was the initial fly area(i overflew to make sure i got what i needed- could -should- have reduced the area flown by ~300' L and W - i need the center ~30 acres- of which half is not -currently- reading into the software.

There is a simple reason for the crash, flight plan software said the flight would take 15 minutes... (which would leave ABOUT 20% of the battery left) however, it was a bit windy thus the flight route took longer, thus that 20% cushion went bye bye.(crashed almost exactly @20 minutes of flight time), and i didn't pay attention to how long it was taking, i was watching the flyover on my tablet.

changed a couple of settings on the calibration and matching and am rerunning it now- it LOOKS like the uncalibrated (mostly thru process pass 1) pictures now have matches and are calibrated....will find out-tomorrow- in about 6hrs when it is finished)

i also changed output from las to xyz comma delimted format so i -should- be able to directly import the point cloud to cad via point input command and choose east north elevation format for my import format, import the points into an empty drawing, on import, it will number them and then run terrain modeler and use all the points to make the topo, then contour it, then export - just- the contours to import into the project file (thus keeping the project file smaller)