Bandwagon's Drones Thread

Nope, roof access plans. We've been doing this project for about 5 years. Usually they just want 10 schools at a time. Now they want almost 50

Vepil - I'm meeting with my friend on Tuesday and possibly going to start sending all of my drafting and surface building work off to him and his company. I'm drowning in work right now and getting 5-10 more requests every week. You have any interest in using them too? He's the COO of a company that's a subsidiary of a regional engineering firm. Him and two of his employees all have 15+ years of experience each with photogrammetry and lidar, and working on large DOT projects.

Vepil said:

Nahh we have a good cad department and just brought in some more help. thanks for the thought though

Click to expand...

I need that. I'm drowning right now. It's 11:22am and I've gotten requests for 5 more flights this morning, with 2 of them aiming for a 1NOV delivery (Ortho, surface & planimetrics). 3 of them are over 300 acres, and one of them is 3x 200ft corridors that are 3 miles each.

I'll post better screenshots when I'm back at work, but this blows my mind. I've always preferred point clouds for 3d stuff, but the 3d models we can do now are insane.
M300 + P1 + Dji Pilot "smart oblique" + DJI Terra (exact same imagery dataset in Pix4d and Metashape produces nice point clouds, but garbage 3d models. Dji Terra does a fantastic job on creating these)

Finally starting to get caught up, and getting more comfortable with the lidar. I finished a few of my projects this week and last, have my friend's company maxed out working on 6 more, another friend's mapping company setup as a subcontractor and ready to work on stuff as needed, and my minion up to speed on field + initial processing workflows.

We're heading out on Monday to do a 31 mile power line survey with lidar drone, and we have Terra Remote flying a 42 mile corridor nearby that we're going to set a few additional targets for.

The PLS/Office manager is retiring in March. We've been trying to find a replacement for him since 2016 and just haven't gotten one that worked out. One guy was a really good fit, but he moved back to North Dakota because he hated the turbo commies in Oregon. It's going to be a shit show when he retires, though. We're going to be pushing a lot more to do more of our work with photogrammetry and lidar (incl mobile eventually). More than likely, I'll keep working for every surveyor at the company and we'll fly + digitize every project for them as a starting point, then they'll send a crew out for fill-in, or other stuff like setting pins. The world just doesn't have enough surveyors and it seems like most of them can't keep 3x crews running every day like my boss does, so everyone is planning on relying on what I'm doing more and more.

And I know we surprised Terra Remote when they found out we're doing a 31 mile line with UAS because the president called me yesterday afternoon to talk shop when I was coordinating with his pilot on flight activities. We didn't cut into their business much when I first started because they were all small sites that wouldn't have normally been flown anyways. Once we started getting into the 1k acre + topos with drones, as well as landfills, we started affecting their bottom line. Now, with starting in on power line surveys this size, we're going to be competing with them on more projects....and projects that we're already involved in because we set their control. I'm hoping we can hire some of their staff as time goes on

Whew, finally had a drone shot at. Guess I can cross that off the bucket list.

Apparently by a fucking moron though. Sounded like a 9mm to me. Definitely wasn't a 12g

Screenshots of my never ending quest for a world that doesn't need breaklines...

That's how my ex brother in law's drone ended but he just hit a lower voltage residential line so the drone just broke into several pieces rather than being vaporized. It was still kind of impressive. I guarantee that he could have never hit that line if he was trying to.