Bandwagon's Drones Thread

m300 drone, L1 sensor.

You're in chicago or something, right? L1 is great value for the money, but it's pretty noisy. Works very well for our rural topos, but not as good for hardscape.

Doing a little demo/presentation at a vineyard on Tuesday. This is a client we do a bunch of survey work for and the manager connected me with one of his subconsultants a couple of weeks ago. We've been nerding out on some ideas and he asked me to come out to a field presentation they're doing next week.

I guess they're going to have a few of these things running around too:

This is a topo map of a different spot that I'm working on finishing up, but I think I'm going to make one for this vineyard site afterwards. I want to try different colors of resin inlay to represent the vineyard block boundaries, using colors that match the varietal....

Random updates

-Preparing for Remote ID, I picked up a Mavic3E RTK to test out as a replacement for all the phantoms. I didn't like the mapping quality I saw with the last M3E, but I also didn't test it out on survey projects before sending it to one of our wetland scientists.

-Just got a sniffer4d methane sensor on loan to try out for a couple months.

-Considering picking up a thermal sensor in next year's budget. I don't have a -real- need for one, but occasionally get requests that thermal would help out.

-I've been doing a ton of scripting lately in global mapper, and it's really starting to pay off. My lidar binning, qaqc and surface building scripts are working Reliably on most projects now. Took me ~20% the labor to finish a 6 mile roadway project, compared to how I was doing it before. Doesn't really impact the digitizing/feature extraction process, but it's a huge time saver for surface building. And I set it up in a way that I can use it to compare different pre-processing workflows or different lidar sensors. I just aim the script at a folder full of lidar and run it, then it'll iterate through each file and different binning settings on each before performing qaqc and ranking them by accuracy in different categories.

-through a teaming relationship I set up, we're pursuing large mobile lidar jobs now. Planning to spend the next few years gaining experience in mobile lidar and building our portfolio this way, then possible being that in house under my supervision too.

-the guy I've been training up to replace me is doing great. For about a year, he's just memorized everything I've shown him and sort of goes through the motions on every job. In the last 3 months or so, he's really shown that he's actually understanding everything. Learning to rely on his own critical thinking and problem solving, etc. Even better....he seems like he really enjoys all this stuff.

Quick & dirty test flight. Methane module isn't working right now, but the other gas sensors are. Here's the graphic for "Flammable Gasses" (CxHy) generated by the software.



I converted the output to geoJSON and set up a script (with CGPT) to display it as a 3D scatter plot in an interactive HTML.

One of our PMs asked me to get some quotes for jobsite cameras so we can do time lapse animations of our construction projects. I really like Earthcam and got a quote. $12k to $20k for a camera on site for 7 months, not counting install cost. It was more expensive than the client (City) wanted, so the engineering manager asked me if I could jimmy rig something that does the same thing.

I got a $160 solar powered 4g hunting camera and spent a few days setting up a script that will download photos and generate an MP4 file every 4 hours. Working great so far, and I set it up so that I can add as many new cameras as I want and have them automatically incorporated into the scheduled script runs. Since it's up and running now, I just ordered 2 more cameras to try on different sites.

Photos all get dumped into one folder accessible on the web, and videos in another. I've got the folders linked back to point features on an ArcGis online web map, so it's easy for different project managers to check photos and videos every morning.

Now, I want to get one of the DJI docks and have a drone take site photos 3x a day, then turn those into a time lapse animation automatically too. I'm waiting on the regs to change to allow unattended flights, but thinking about picking up a dock next month anyways just so I can work on getting that shit working. I want all this stuff functioning so when the regs support it, I'm ready to start deploying the drone docks on all our construction projects.

Just tested out Skydio's "3D Scan" mission.

The app and drone kinda suck, the controller REALLY sucks, but the mission is fucking awesome. I'll post some videos and screenshots when I get it all downloaded and processed.

It's crazy how variable the results are in different software & services. The 3D model in DroneDeploy for this one looks pretty bleh because of the mesh triangle limitations.

Currently working on a 3,500ac site. 500gb of raw data. Ortho and DSM are 100gb each. Point cloud is about 3 billion points. I believe I've found the limits of my processing computer.