Bandwagon's Drones Thread

We run about 20,000 acres. Half deeded and half either public or private leases.

BrutulTM said:

We run about 20,000 acres. Half deeded and half either public or private leases.

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Well, I can still render you a 4'x6' map in about 10 minutes if you send me a polygon. I can check to see if your county has taxlot layers hosted where I can access them, too. I'm not sure if the lease boundaries would show up on there, but the deeded properties should. Would give you something to markup at least, and I like this kind of stuff.

I'm surface building today, so I'll have a lot of 5-10 minute breaks.

Sent you an email. Thanks again.

Took about 2 minutes to find a parcel layer for all of Montana. I wish it was that easy where we are!
I'll shoot you a link in a few.

BrutulTM said:

Sent you an email. Thanks again.

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Emailed you a link to PDFs + KMZ with parcels. If you want to add anything, just edit the KMZ with what you want and I can spit out a new PDF without any real work

Bandwagon said:

Took about 2 minutes to find a parcel layer for all of Montana. I wish it was that easy where we are!
I'll shoot you a link in a few.

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Yeah, Montana really makes it easy. Thanks for the .kml though, I have one but the parcels are totally opaque which makes it hard to figure out where you are sometimes. This one is much nicer.

Bandwagon said:

Emailed you a link to PDFs + KMZ with parcels. If you want to add anything, just edit the KMZ with what you want and I can spit out a new PDF without any real work

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Thanks man, that is really cool. A couple questions though.

Is it possible to do it in higher resolution? Not that it needs to be, but I was curious.
Are there different sources for imagery? I noticed that the ones on this picture are older than what's on Google Earth.
How would you go about getting something like that printed?
I noticed that the property lines going North/South and East/West are not square to the picture but slightly cocked which is always how it seems to default when you open Google Earth as well. Is there a reason for that?

BrutulTM said:

Yeah, Montana really makes it easy. Thanks for the .kml though, I have one but the parcels are totally opaque which makes it hard to figure out where you are sometimes. This one is much nicer.




Thanks man, that is really cool. A couple questions though.

Is it possible to do it in higher resolution? Not that it needs to be, but I was curious.
Are there different sources for imagery? I noticed that the ones on this picture are older than what's on Google Earth.
How would you go about getting something like that printed?
I noticed that the property lines going North/South and East/West are not square to the picture but slightly cocked which is always how it seems to default when you open Google Earth as well. Is there a reason for that?

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Yea, I think I can do up to 1200 DPI. I would need to export the imagery overnight first, though. Would probably lock up my computer if I tried to stream and render it at the same time.
This imagery source is BING, but I think I have google as a source too.
You should be able to take that PDF to any print shop and have them print it out for you. We do this for clients.

The lines aren't square because of the projection I used. I was in NAD83 State Plane. Google uses WGS84. I can rotate it though if needed.

I'll get some google earth satellite exporting right now. It's easier to make changes when I'm not working with streamed imagery.

I'm going to have this thing etched onto a piece of 1/8" steel so that I can start beating people to death with it.

Vepil said:

Bandwagon BrutulTM

https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=f5ce1706dd0545af8d867e88fc5ca1d1

This is the 2107 Aerial Imagery in ArcGIS, pull in that KMZ you can might can print something nice from this rather than Google Earth.

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I use NAIP for survey because the precision tends to be better, but the resolution with Bing/Google is almost always better than NAIP.

Vepil said:

Yeah here in GA we are spoiled the county we do all out work for is doing some amazing imagery and we get it for free. Each SID image is about 4GB and we have to resample them down and takes forever so the office has something for daily use.

I haven't had to use Google for about 15 years, wasn't aware they have improved the quality. I do like Bing with the birds eye view and how you can rotate around, helps when you are looking at an area when the surveyor didn't get enough pictures. Seems they aren't doing that as much as they were though as some areas are not being updated with the birds eye.

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Global mapper is $500 and will allow you to resample, compress and export to a bunch of different formats. It's pretty quick, too. Are you using global express?


I'm working on a digital field form for Survey this week and hoping to have it ready for use next week. The survey manager was scoffing at these things at first, but he hates it when the crews just dump 50 random pictures in the project folder and he likes that the digital forms can stamp the photos and show their location on a reference map.

I really want to get one of these to play with -

If I mounted it on a survey truck or a survey rod, I think I could set it up to auto-trigger every time the crew moves XXX feet and build virtual tours from ground + aerial panos.

I really want to post some of the stuff I've been working on lately, but I don't have it split up by confidential vs non-confidential yet.

Here you go, Vepil

After being invited to his first kissing party, 12-year-old Max (Room‘s Jacob Tremblay) is panicking because he doesn’t know how to kiss. Eager for some pointers, Max and his best friends Thor (Brady Noon, HBO’s Boardwalk Empire) and Lucas (Keith Williams, Fox’s The Last Man On Earth) decide to use Max’s dad’s drone – which Max is forbidden to touch – to spy (they think) on a teenage couple making out next door.
But when things go ridiculously wrong, the drone is destroyed. Desperate to replace it before Max’s dad (Will Forte, The Last Man on Earth) gets home, the boys skip school and set off on an odyssey of epically bad decisions involving some accidentally stolen drugs, frat-house paintball, and running from both the cops and terrifying teenage girls (Life of the Party‘s Molly Gordon and Ocean’s Eight’s Midori Francis).

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Probably not the greatest thing for the public's perception of drones. Everybody thinks they're going to be peeking in your bedroom window but in reality unless you're deaf, they're not going to be able to get close enough to see in without you noticing. They're pretty damn noisy.

I guess it's time for a quick update / blog entry.

The DJI Phantom 4 Pro has been great, but they're no longer being made and there's not a suitable replacement in sight. I tried the Mavic 2 Pro on a couple mapping missions, but the quality & accuracy is noticeably worse. We have 7 of the phantoms in use right now and I have a single backup still in the box.

The built-in geofencing is becoming a big problem. It prevents the drone from flying in controlled airspace even when we have a waiver, and you have to go through an unlock process to get it unlocked. That's not horrible by itself, but the main problem is that you have to unlock every time you power the drone on. So on multi battery mapping missions, you have to keep switching back to the DJI app to unlock the airspace and launch the drone, then switch back to the mapping app to resume. Even worse, if you're flying a site that's half inside controlled airspace and half outside of controlled airspace, the mapping mission will stop as soon as it hits the geofence barrier. So you're forced to launch from the controlled airspace portion of the site, even though that may not be the most ideal spot to map from (you want to launch from the highest point on site, hopefully located centrally).

I'm not really enjoying some of the surface/digitizing work just because you spend so much time second guessing yourself and wondering if the level of detail you're working towards is too much or too little. Trying to communicate capabilities, limitations and budget impact on surface & planimetric work is the most frustrating part, and trying to get other people to communicate their needs/expectations in a way that makes sense is equally frustrating. I'm always wondering how other people go through the process of surface building from drone data and if I'm doing it in the most efficient way possible. Every time I've been able to see how other people do it though, it's either the same way I'm doing it or much, much worse. That's a little reassuring, but I still think there has to be a less clunky way to do this type of work.



I've still been plugging away on the GIS stuff too, and making a lot more progress now. Learning just enough programming to start writing simple javascript files and make HTTP API calls to the ESRI Rest endpoints has helped a lot and I'm able to see the path forward much better now. I have a UAS dashboard that's up & running and actually functional for the management & planning work that I do. It's running on a dedicated computer on my desk and auto-updates every 2 minutes with flight logs and requests, and I can manage the whole roster and fleet from it. In the last two weeks, I've set up a mobile flight log app that will query the airspace layers where the pilot is located and tell them if they're in controlled airspace or if there are any TFRs/NOTAMs in their area. I'm using the FAA's GIS layers for the query, but if I switch it over to Airmap.io I could actually give them the ability to request waivers on-the-fly in the field through the same app.
The coolest part though is that calcs the total flight duration automatically and then when they submit the flight log, it'll update their total flight hours and generate a report that gets emailed to both of us and automatically downloaded to the flight log folder on our server. When I have time, I'll have it start adding flight time to the aircraft and batteries used as well.

My favorite feature that I just got working is letting project managers request an estimate or services from a web map that contains parcels/taxlots. Clicking on a hyperlink will launch a web form where they can fill out what they want and when they want it.

They fill out a quick form that takes ~2 minutes. The taxlot (or drawn polygon) is automatically extracted and inserted in this form. All the fields are added to the polygon as attributes...


And then emailed to me with a summary.


In the last week, I've gotten automatic airspace checks/analysis to work when a request is submitted....


and I just got routing ("find nearest licensed operator") mostly working yesterday.


And all of this stuff funnels in to my dashboard that auto-updates every couple minutes -


The digital field forms are getting real popular here and it's just myself and another young-ish guy developing them as we have spare time. We're working on a couple for the geo-tech group and the natural resources group for wetlands delineations and borehole logs that will also query USGS soil data and national wetlands inventory data while they're filling out their reports. Especially for the industrial hygiene guys, we're expecting about a 20% increase in labor efficiency with these things just because they will create a ready-to-email report automatically instead of the field staff having to coming back to the office to make the report. Just found out yesterday that we're being nominated for an ESRI SAG award, too. Nice compliment, but I feel like we barely have our toes in the pool and we really haven't accomplished anything huge yet. Different story once it's fully implemented in the company and used by the majority of the staff.

Hey Vepil do you have any experience with handheld LiDAR like the GeoSlam Horizon?