Bandwagon's Drones Thread

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Lenardo

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Trying to justify adding gps for existing condition site surveying(NOT CONTROL) for the company. we just got a new total station (one that cost 5k), adding this might help but looking at the max precision that even the trimble r10 gives, it is not precise ENOUGH to use just the gps.

max precision is 8mmH(0.026') and 15mm V (0.049'), that is not good enough for survey control, for locating stuff, sure it is fine, but that precision error would fuck my traverses/control badly- i complain if my "raw" traverses are worse than 1 in 40 thousand- one foot error in 40000 feet measured or one hundredth(0.01') off per 500 feet of traverse i don't accept traverse that is not less than one in 15000- raw for angular error of closure either.(that way i never have to balance the traverse-and if the survey crew is not doing work that precise for a closed traverse loop, with the current equipment (1 second total station), they are doing something wrong)

also some sites we do elevation certificates and a 15mm vertical precision error on a few sites could force a change from needing flood insurance instead of not needing flood insurance.

a scanning total station though, i want.very expensive though ( 44k retail-shows you what the markup is-though some chinese firm has one for 20k (like i'd order one from them).
 
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Bandwagon

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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Finally found an engineer at the company that's figuring out how to use point clouds. ;) This is the 2nd animation he's done for a project proposal, and both have made a huge difference in the selection process. The whole city council was blown away with this one. Really tough area to get a clean point cloud, but I guess I'm going to have to start focusing more on building complete point clouds & cleaning them up, since I'm not the only one that's going to see them anymore.

 
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Lenardo

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Raymond Hinz- Head of the Land Surveying Dept at UMaine(where my son is going to go this upcoming fall- Civil Major, Land Surveying minor) says that a lot of his students that intern at larger companies spend most of their time cleaning up/categorizing point clouds now.

nice Animation though. i have to work on figuring that stuff out--after upgrading our acad though, the version of cad i have atm does not do point clouds. (v2006) pretty sure i could manage it with pix4d though (except for the proposed work)
 
Bandwagon

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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Yea I think i'm about ready for an intern to help with that and digitizing. We actually pay our interns pretty well, too.

Cleaning up and classifying the point clouds can be really time consuming and I've never found an automated process that gets anywhere close to 100% reliability. I've got same ways to improve the quality in urban areas just with flight planning and processing settings, but I still haven't found a really good way to bring in dense vegetation reliably. I'd be happy with a solid canopy in the point cloud, but it produces so much noise when I change my processing settings to increase canopy points. The most effective way I've found so far is to process the project twice with different settings, and then pull the vegetated regions out of one and put them in the other.
 
Foler

The_Black_Log Foler

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Tldr:

Bandwagon Bandwagon what's your drone setup? What are you using for a flight controller? PX4 vanilla or some derivative?

I used to do SLAM with point clouds back in the olden days when cheapest lidar was like 20k. Can get them for so cheap now.
 
Bandwagon

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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Now? Sensefly eBee + SODA and Phantom 4 Pros.

3DR Solo + S100 before that.

Pixhawk/Finwing Penquin + S100 before that.
 
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Lenardo

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phantom 4 pro here with pix4d for processing.

we only do smaller jobs ~100 acres or less (typically 10 acres or less) mostly due to there are really no LARGE tracts of land in my area.
 
Foler

The_Black_Log Foler

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Nice.

Thinking of getting back into the drone game. Used to roll my own prior using 3dr's apm, did use first version of pixhawk on one. I have one that runs a apm 2.6 with an rf900 for telemetry, and dragonlink. Thing has ridiculous long distance control with fpv and telemetry. Def not FCC kosher.

Biggest limiting factor was battery tech. Got to the point where I had a drone that could do 20 miles with reasonable line of sight but what's the point when you can only fly for 20min.

Would like to potentially repurpose to a fixed wing drone for more efficiency. Interested in seeing if I can push data from drone to the cloud for real time like analysis and distribution. First thought was onboard gsm module and writing the firmware for it but not sure what height max is before it would stop hitting towers for reception, also since it would be pushing data in real time it seems costly inefficient doing constant http request.

Maybe it would be better to just utilize pre-existing long distance telemetry setup at the right frequency, maybe 900mhz range to push to ground station then push to cloud from there.

I'd like to be able to push larger data sets tho. I've used lidar before while doing research to generate point cloud maps for SLAM. Tech has gotten so much cheaper and evolved. Would be cool if I could I could take rgb or lidar data, push it real time to the cloud and reconstruct those maps in faster time.

I'll have to check out sensefly more. May not be realistic idea just due to time processing Tiff's. I've processed large Tiff datasets before and it can take hours.
 
Bandwagon

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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Phantom 4 Pro V2 was discontinued at the end of last year, and the stock finally ran out (they had a problem sourcing parts). P5 still hasn't been announced, so I had to get a Mavic2Pro.

Sending one of my P4Pros to one of our new pilots, and I'll be flying the P4P and Mavic2 side by side on the next 10 projects or so.

20190423_075931.jpg
 
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Lenardo

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THE PRO V2 Sucked if i remember correctly, i have the V1.

Alas the Drone season for my area is basically over as the leaves are coming out now.. got one job to do in boston (a redev site i am going to fly at i think 100') as the site is 2 acres of MOSTLY parking lot-but the weather has not been cooperating for the past week and a half, either REALLY windy(25+mph winds) or...Rain. and it is hard to do sites that are mostly deciduous trees. my drone season is from novemeber thru mid april.
 
BrutulTM

BrutulTM

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Is there any downside to the Mavic vs. the Phantom? I want to get a Mavic but it's mainly because it looks a lot cooler. Is there any reason not to?
 
Bandwagon

Bandwagon

Kolohe
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I don't have any complaints about the v2. It took a month or two for it to be supported in most apps, but no issues otherwise.

I've been doing a ton of work with Esri/ArcGIS Online/Survey123 lately. I have a handful of people field testing some of the Survey123 forms. Right now, it's being used for environmental site assessments, borehole logs, construction stormwater permit weekly inspections, and generic photos & captions.
I'm working on one right now for requesting UAS services that will automatically generate a report of the site based on airspace classifications, elevation variation, NOTAMs and hazards (radio towers), flights over highways, etc. I'm really enjoying learning how to do all of this stuff. Getting to learn some python and javascript. Just got reverse geocoding working yesterday, so PMs can attach photos, GPS coordinates will be automatically extracted and geocoded, then the address will write into the PDF report. I was able to extract the compass direction too, but haven't been able to figure out how to use my own custom map symbol and rotate based on that attribute.

Here's my integromat scenario that basically does all of this:

Trigger on survey submit
Export submitted geometry (geoshape) as KML (to user items root folder)
Status of exported item
Share exported item with everyone & defined groups
Sleep 10s
HTTP Get exported kml
Send email
Delete exported KML from user items (still in feature layer)
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Finally got branching scenarios to work, too, so PMs can decide if they want the report in PDF (straight to the client) or in docx (send back to the office for editing).
Here's a snapshot of the simple "Generic Photos & Captions" form:
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BrutulTM said:
Is there any downside to the Mavic vs. the Phantom? I want to get a Mavic but it's mainly because it looks a lot cooler. Is there any reason not to?
Click to expand...
Not really sure yet. My opinion (with having never flown a Mavic yet) is that the Mavic 2 is the better option for everyone unless you're doing mapping, and I'm not even sure yet how the Mavic 2 performs for mapping.
 
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Lenardo

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phantom 4 pro is discontinued
i think the 4 pro v2 is still being made -20 mp and mechanical shutter camera

mavik, pro, pro platinum are only 12 mp and electronic shutter camera only

mavik 2 20 mp and electronic shutter only

no idea if the electronic shutter is good or bad.

other than that they look extremely similar spec wise for the rest.
 
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Lenardo

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4 pro v2 doesn't come up with a discontinued tag on the dji website when i click on the 4 pro v2 "product" selection while the 4 pro does a pop up pointing you to the mavik 2

and ya that controller, just eww i like the old fashioned hefty style of the 4 pro,
 
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