Bandwagon's Drones Thread

NICE NICE the only thing i don't like is the fact that you actuallly cannot look "thru" the scope..a camera image on a screen-even live- isn't as good as the naked eyeball mk1 and my fingers doing the fine tune on tough shots (i have a slide on cup dial with a rod insert that makes the fine tune knob like 5" in diameter-for those really fine tune situations, i use it RARELY-mostly cuz too lazy to get it out of the car but, i can fine tune the angle shot very precisely if need be)

we are debating as to getting the lifetime pix4d license (been doing monthly as jobs come up- pay a month. go 4 months with nothing- pay a month etc), and i think for the end of the year purchases we make, that might be one of them, as well as a new hp plotter since the one we have is a bit old and the usp printer plug broke (the inner black part, the wires are still intact, we have the usb plug TAPED in the plug to keep it working...

I know how to RUN pix4d and get good resolution on the topography.

the main reason why we might buy the lifetime, is we have several jobs(4?) lined up (no leaves on trees YAY) and the office manager asked about us doing the yearly subscription instead of monthly, i ran the math on the pricing and it is not worth doing the yearly vs lifetime.

4990 lifetime license vs 3504 Yearly license..if you are going to do the year, suck it up for a month income wise, pay the 1500 dollars more for lifetime and by the time the 7th job comes around it will have paid for itself....and the rest of the jobs you do will be just you as the boss paying employees for office time and the time for the one person to fly the sites (typically an hr), while charging the same amount of money as a field crew doing the work (they still do the site survey, just not the Topo survey). we charge, i think, about 1000 a day to do survey work(2 people 5 hr minimum)-slightly less if we know it will take a few days like 750 a day if it is a good client we work with a lot. an 100 acre parcel-would take about 4 days to survey manually so we are talking ~3000 for the survey plus a day of office work for the plan, that same parcel would take the drone MAYBE 2 hrs depending on the drone used. so we charge 3000 for the topo, and a day for the plan generation(that takes my computer a day or so to to render)

IT hasn't waned, but around here, most sites we do are sub 10k in square footage, so using the drone is frankly overkill for the detail needed. so i am interested etc. just we really cannot do topo via a drone on overgrown sites during the summer, too many trees in the way. drone season around here is end of november thru april, with breaks due to snowpack.

most of our work is in boston so it is flight restricted (though i have flown the drone there under 150 feet so no issues come up on one sight were we needed to know how far down the underpass was adjacent to the property (33' lower)

Wife and kids bought me a potensic d58. Obviously nothing fancy and a bit of a throwaway if it breaks. But damn I love that thing. Zips around pretty quick but wind can be a pain in the ass. My brother has a dji mavic that is awesome but 10x the price.

Cool hobby, can see myself losing all my money to it

Nope, but flying is the fun part for me haha.

Brother took some 4k vids of our hikes

i saw that email and thought. bandwagon is going to be estatic...unless they bork the camera up.

a few weeks ago i just flew 3 sites (finally) but i have been too busy to incorporate the resultant topo to the sites

first site- actually about a quarter mile from my house, ~10 acres on a hilltop covered by trees that the owner is going to try to develop- there are 3 paper streets and lots there currently, but the lots are all ~5k and the current zoning is 15k with 125' of frontage, there is a wetland and potential vernal pool on site, so we think after getting the record plan in (done in 1913 by a good draftsman/surveyor (plan worked excellently) we think we'll get probably 9 lots out of the deal-steep slopes with ledge are hindering it, but by following the EXISTING roads, the city CANNOT say the road is too long- even though we are cutting one of the roads short with a culdesac- we extend the road to the existing roadway, but the culdesac is -in all honesty a better design. the flyover with the leaves off got MOST of the trees out of the topo but a few dense clusters of trees and most of the houses(roofs same color as the pavement) got contoured, no real big deal, i just erase the contours after i dxfin the data. still waiting on the survey data to scale the mosaic and the rest of the site properly, i can see in the mosaic 4 or 5 stone bounds and a stone wall or three. we have not surveyed the lot yet, i'll add in the gcp's after that is done and tie it all together the do the next steps and do a preliminary subdivision.

owner is going to have an issue with at least 3 neighbors, especially one of them, those neighbors are encroaching onto the site 2 significantly - one neighbor has a built in pool half off his property- my client has leverage,,,he OWNS the property now, and discovered it, the pool is no more than say 10years so, its, a case of, you want to protest, fine, REMOVE YOUR POOL AND PATIO AND FENCE from my property... otherwise, when we do the subdivision, we'll cut out land so that your pool etc can be combined into your lot. other neighbors has lawn and parking and and above ground pool encroaching...so same deal.

I still have to tweak the mosaic a touch position and scale but nothing will move more than a foot or three. google earth shows no pool there prior to 2003. and a pool either being built or there in 2005. white boxes are 2 possible house locations. brown lines are the propsed new property lines purple are existing lot lines i highlighted the encroachment and the 2 neighbor lots, the far left black line is an existing stone wall that the mosiac is using for position atm-also using the back of sidewalks around the site for street positioning