Bandwagon's Drones Thread

So I'm about a month into having the new camera & lidar. I think I've done 6 or 7 jobs with it since then, but they were all scoped as photogrammetry so the lidar portion has just been me playing around and getting familiar.

The first real use is on a massive project I had to fly low on due to controlled airspace. The flying is fine, no issues there. But all of the workflows in the office are different (some new processes, some new software). It's unfortunate that this was my first project with the new setup because its 300gb of raw data, 16k images and trial and error with new software takes a long ass time when I want to reprocess and see if I'm getting better results with something different. I'm looking forward to getting this one done, but I have another massive 11mile corridor job next week....with no cell service.

I really just want to spend a month with all this stuff on small, local jobs to get it dialed in. All in all though, the mapping camera is awesome. It looks like its going to be impossible to get a 500 acre ortho into CAD at 0.03' GSD, even with SID. Every other software package handles big ortho just fine, but autocad needs to get their shit together on this stuff.

The lidar is impressive, even with a low-end sensor. I'm set up with Microstation and terrascan now, so I'm working on getting proficient and efficient with it and am pretty optimistic about it.

I'm a little annoyed with my well tuned workflows having to change, but excited to get all the new stuff dialed in too

I'm liking these tools though




This was kind of cool to find. I was looking for sub-surface noise points in the lidar that I missed during clean-up. I thought this was one:


Nope. Got a few hits under the grate.




The above flight is a re-fly, by the way. The first deployment was with 2x Phantom 4 Pros and we did it in pretty shitty weather. Low lighting and some wet roads. I reflew it with the new drone because I couldn't get a decent road surface out of the previous flight.

Old Ortho (P4P Pro) : 0.06' pixels, 16GB


New Ortho (M300 RTK + P1) : 0.027' pixels, 150GB


And Here's the DSM, but I haven't really figured out the right settings yet for DSM generation. I'm just happy that the curb looks pretty well defined with the default settings

Did an 11mile corridor in really steep terrain, no cell service. Post processing qa/qc was not great at all in the East half. After about 4 hours of troubleshooting, figured out it's because a lot of my ppk'd imagery and lidar was actually in float down in the canyons. Re-ran a few with CORS download and its looking pretty good now.

I actually had a lot of fun troubleshooting this. I don't mind hiccups as long as I can find the problem

Kiroy said:

Really trying to figure out a tradeskill that is reasonable for a female to do and this seems pretty good.

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Kiroy said:

Imma be hitting you up in about 8 years when my daughter is 10 to figure out what drone stuff to get her to get her on this path. I assume a tertiary skill would be learning arcgis ect. Really trying to figure out a tradeskill that is reasonable for a female to do and this seems pretty good. Trying to build a number of hobbies that could lead into applicable job skills for her down the road, while also living in the reality that she probably won't be an hvac technician or electrician. Don't worry, i'll have her trained up to be anti woke.

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Geospatial / Geodesy / Geodetics is a huuuuuuuuuuge tent that would give someone a lot of options for good careers down the road, I think. I don't think doing mapping in-house is going to last all that long, honestly. I might get a full career out of it, but I don't know if I would push a kid towards "drone mapping" as a profession right now. I imagine it's going to be replaced by satellite data and/or incidental collection from drones (like Amazon delivery drones) eventually.

I've been brainstorming what to get my daughter going with, too. I really think some kind of graphics/CAD software + 3d printer/CNC laser or router is an awesome direction to aim kids. They can be creative and learn how to create their ideas, and I think any kind of vector drafting/modelling software gives them a whole lot of options in the future, too.

A teenager with a little CAD experience and a CNC machine could start a damn business pretty easily.

Just noticed how well the L1 did in this vegetated area. This DEM was created from the auto-classified ground points from the L1.....no manual cleanup at all. Honestly, I wasn't expecting it to work this well in this spot, either the penetration/raw sensor data under the canopy, OR the reliability of the automatic ground classification. Color me impressed.





Checkshots are averaging 0.03' to 0.06' on all of the ones that are appropriate to use as checks (some of what you're seeing below is just because of where the checkshots fall)

Point cloud from the ~11m road project. (Use "Earth Control" under the navigation settings) - Potree Viewer

I had about a 5in vertical error on the far east end. After a lot of detective work, figured out it was very likely a combination of the canyons + a stupid base location setup + PPK. I thought I had a good base location when I parked, but I was thinking I'd have the receiver on a 7ft base for static. I ended up using the 2ft tripod instead because of all the wind we were having, but didn't reassess the placement after I made that choice. Railroad tie gate post ~5-10ft to the north was blocking a lot of the satellites I needed for PPK, so I had a bunch of stuff in float. Lesson learned.

And don't mind the classification stuff in that viewer. I'm not too familiar with the potree viewer, but there's a whole class in there (I think high veg) that's not toggling on and off when you toggle in the viewer.

Vepil have you had to replace props on your M300 yet?

Those motherfuckers are a bitch to remove

Vepil said:

Use a soldering iron and hold it on the bolt head. They have loctite from the factory. I have twisted off the head even after using the heat, didn't leave it on there long enough. Make sure you have really good tools not those cheap wrenches they supply also. I had a 35w soldering iron on the head until I saw a bit of smoke or so and it eased right out.

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That's exactly what I did.....but I didn't wait for it to smoke. I held the iron on there for 20 sec at first, then 60sec a few times (and I have a nice soldering iron). My wrench slipped the first time, so I left it alone and finished my job with a broken prop tip (about 1/4in off the tip). Then I tried again with my tools I brought from home and still couldn't get the fuckers out. Took it to a machine shop, and those guys couldn't get them out either.

We have another M300 budgeted for next year (starting in October), so I just ordered that thing and set it all up yesterday and did a test flight, then shipped the first one back to DJI. Pretty damn emasculating having to send that thing in for a fucking broken prop.

I didn't want to risk melting something with the soldering iron though, but next time I'll give it more time to heat up. Thanks.

Vepil said:

One of their service techs recommended it to me on a phone call. Yeah those are a b to get out.

One good thing is they will probably do a service on it since the drone is in for repairs and if anything is acting up they will replace it under warranty. DJI has the best warranty service I have ever seen. We had a user error and one clipped an antenna while doing an inspection flight and fell 250' to the ground. $900 later we had a new m300 in a week and an updated warranty applied. I loathed "Chinese" but DJI does it right man.

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DJI Customer service has always been absolute dogshit, but I hear they treat the enterprise/care-refresh customers pretty well. We'll see how this goes. Nothing else was wrong with it except the screws being stuck and eventually rounded out.

Honestly that's the only glaring design flaw I see in the M300 so far.

Vepil said:

Yeah I really liked the fixed blades (no joints for folding) of the M210 they were push and twist and worked great. Enterprise customers have it great. We even forgot to apply the care warranty to that one that crashed and they honored it anyway, advised us to add it this one before we flew it.

Probably should add that we have purchased 1 M210 and 3 M300's from them so maybe they treat us a bit better dunno but I think you will have a better experience working with enterprise vs consumer.

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I have 23 of their drones on the books, 3 of which are enterprise. Shouldn't I be getting comp'd trips to vegas by now?!

I'm balls-deep in terrascan macros today. Trying to figure out how to incorporate visible band vegetation index into the automatic ground classification.

Vepil said:

Have you figured up the total you spent with them? We were looking with batteries, replacement parts and drones we are in roughly $85k, crazy amounts. They don't look at the consumer stuff, the enterprise as far as I know is completely separate.

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That's about where we are too, but it'll be a little over $100k by the time I get the rest of the kit for the 2nd M300 setup.



Different topic - I spent about half the day working on figuring out how to tweak the ground classification parameters in Terrascan, based on this exhilarating video:


It finished up just as I was getting ready to go home so I only spent about 5-10 minutes looking over the results, but it seems to be greatly improved. I have field work and trainings the next 3 days, so I won't know until I can compare the results to the out-of-the-box results.

Training my new helper today. Had to keep a close eye on him...

Mapping 48 school sites in Portland this weekend. iRobot