Drones

[dgaddis]

Anyone here used a drone? We just got one at work to take photos/video of completed projects, as well as use it for surveying, I'll be 'the drone guy' since I manage our website and take photos and whatnot. Anyhow, we picked the DJI Mavic Air 2, about ~$1,100 out the door w/the 'fly more' kit that comes with extra batteries and some other stuff. About half an hour of flight time per battery. 12MP still camera w/digital voodoo to bring it up to 48MP, shoots up to 8K video, over 200fps is available at lower resolutions, all sorts of 'auto pilot' features. SUPER easy to fly. If you've ever played a video game where you use two joysticks to move around it takes about 5 minutes to get the hang of it.

Since we're using it commercially I have to get a certificate from the FAA...so soon I'll (sorta kinda) be a pilot and I won't be a poser when wearing my pilots watch haha.

Anyhow, I've got a lot to learn as far as camera settings and whatnot. Looking forward to it though! K-12 schools are the bulk of our work, and it's hard to get good exterior photos from the ground since they tend to be large footprint buildings.

Studying for the exam to get the certificate.


Our office (nice new white roof) from 400ft (as high as we can legally fly it)


My hood.


The Ocmulgee River. The powerplant on the horizon is the largest coal fired plant in North America, and it's about ~18-19 miles away from the camera.

[rwsaunders]

In addition to site cameras that record activities and key environmental conditions, we now shoot all of our projects weekly with a drone. As we work nationally, we contract locally for the service as we like our site supers to stay focused on the project. Once you used them you never go back.

[dgaddis]

I work for an MEP consulting firm, so we aren't (exactly) in the construction business, we do design and have a CA guy who routinely visits work sites to ensure things are being built per our design and specs. Our firm is ~33yrs old and most of the employees have been here for 25yrs, but there is a 'new class' of us younger folks who have been hired the last few years (me being one of the first 4 years ago). We have traditionally not done a good job marketing ourselves, we did a lot of work for the same handful of architects. But we do want to keep growing, doing bigger jobs, with more clients, etc. So I volunteered to rebuilt our website, which was (no joke) at least 15 years old and looked terrible, and I'm going to keep our 'gallery' up to date with recent work (something we really didn't do at all previously). K-12 schools are the biggest chunk of our work, but we do stuff at various military bases as well, as well as local government buildings, things like that. We've done some prison work, hospitals, apartments, dorms, some industry (we have an alligator farm project right now that's pretty cool). I previously worked for a company that was the 3rd largest engineering firm in the world at the time (CH2M Hill, which merged with Jacobs a few years ago) and I vastly prefer working where I am now, in a much smaller firm (we have about 30 folks), where I get to do more and feel like my contribution actually matters. Plus we have office dogs and they're awesome.

Anyhow, the drone will be a big asset I think for marketing purposes. It'll also be helpful for surveying, we can take photos of rooftops and drop them into RevIt to sketch on top of for laying out existing equipment and whatnot without having to measure every little thing in the field.

Here's some of our recently completed projects. I started almost 4 years ago and some of the first bigger jobs I worked on are just now complete and have kids in the school. Always nice seeing a computer model turn into a steel and brick and glass.

$57 million high school on the south side of ATL.






Another $57 million HS, but on the north side of ATL.






Big ~$50 million renovation to this HS on the south side. The project was done in four phases while school was in session over the course of several years, and by the end of it most of the original building had been torn down and rebuilt. This was actually the first big project I worked on, they're just now wrapping it up and applying the final touches.

[vertical_doug]

[sk_tle]

I have a drone which has been collecting dusts for months because I have been to lazy to fill the paper to be correctly insured as per our local laws. Which means I probably don't really need it although I enjoyed flying the one I owned 4y ago.

It is just that between riding my bike, paddling, having social activities with friends or flying a drone, the drone always lose during my free time. I wish I had a need to do that professionnally though.

[gregl]

Dustin, my sincere thanks for your professionalism and adherence to UAV regulations! I have spent a big chunk of the past few years working in the UAV technical space, including my employer's UAV operations and management, UAV safety (including managing large UAVs flying in the US national airspace), and counter-UAV operations. One of our customers even deemed my team's work "historic." It warms my heart to see people using UAVs in safe, effective ways. All too often, I see them used inappropriately and illegally. Of course, we have ways to deal with those folks too...

Greg

[rwsaunders]

One of the smaller projects that was completed in May...still made sense to use the drones, which supplemented the 24/7 site cameras.

[dgaddis]

Dustin, my sincere thanks for your professionalism and adherence to UAV regulations! I have spent a big chunk of the past few years working in the UAV technical space, including my employer's UAV operations and management, UAV safety (including managing large UAVs flying in the US national airspace), and counter-UAV operations. One of our customers even deemed my team's work "historic." It warms my heart to see people using UAVs in safe, effective ways. All too often, I see them used inappropriately and illegally. Of course, we have ways to deal with those folks too...

Greg

Now THAT is a drone!

Took the test last week, there were some things I hadn't seen in my studying but I passed.

Now, some honesty time. Totally crashed it Friday afternoon. Made some dumb decisions without thinking things through, thankfully no damage done other than a set of roasted rotors.

We've been flying around our office a bit for practice, getting a feel for controlling it, looking at different camera settings, etc. I had been having some issues with my iPhone 7 freezing up while flying. I would get a "mobile device CPU overloaded" warning and occasionally the screen would freeze, I wasn't seeing a live view of the camera but I could still fly the drone and never lost control of it. Made some adjustments to the settings hoping to make it less taxing on the CPU, and it seemed to work, flew it a good bit Friday morning with no issues. Friday afternoon we were flying it and one guy was leaving we, errr, I decided to test the 'follow' mode. I got it set, Brandon drove off, we watched the drone follow him and thought "wow, cool" then looked down and my phone screen was froze, it was still showing Brandon's car next to use in the parking lot. Uh-oh. Then it wouldn't respond, and I couldn't stop the follow mode. I was worried we were going to lose it. Instead it flew into a telephone line, getting the cable between the camera and drone body, it did a whole bunch of loop-de-loops around the line, then fell ~20ft to asphalt. One piece of plastic broke loose, but it snapped back in place. The rotors are all trashed. We got EXTREMELY lucky, and I can't believe it still works after taking that fall.

It scared the s*** out of me, and I haven't stopped thinking about it all weekend. We got lucky, but it could have ended poorly in a whole host of ways. Lots of lessons learned.

Mistakes I made:
-It assumed I could stop it before it left the parking lot, as such I didn't have it high enough to avoid obstacles like cable/power lines or trees. That assumption was wrong. It's collision detection sensors *should* see a tree, but they don't see cables.
-I should have told Brandon to loop back to us before leaving, just in case.
-I should not have been using an auto pilot mode when there may be issues with my phone freezing.

While our drone can supposedly be flown up to 6.2 miles away from the controller this emphasized why you're legally supposed to keep it in sight at all times, and was a good hard lesson on why that's a rule we can not, and will not, break.

I'm hoping to get an iPhone 12 soon when the new 13's come out. Our next flight will be an actual use flight, not just practicing, in two weeks. If I don't have a new phone by then we'll use someone else's newer and more power phone, my 7 won't be used to fly it ever again.

[Bob Ross]

I decided to test the 'follow' mode.

Can you elaborate on what exactly 'follow' mode is and how it's supposed to work?

[dgaddis]

Can you elaborate on what exactly 'follow' mode is and how it's supposed to work?

You tell it what to follow (by drawing a box around it on the phone screen for our drone, which uses your phone as a viewfinder and part of the controller), and then the drone follows that thing on autopilot so to speak. You can also do a “parallel follow” where it follow off to the side (but with the camera pointing at the subject), but that’s extra sketchy because our drone doesn’t have side sensors to avoid obstacles.

Any time you see drone footage where the camera is following a subject (car, mountain biker, motorcycle, etc) the drone may be flying itself.

[Bob Ross]

You tell it what to follow (by drawing a box around it on the phone screen for our drone, which uses your phone as a viewfinder and part of the controller), and then the drone follows that thing on autopilot so to speak.

Ah, interesting... I had always assumed the drones in those scenarios were somehow locking onto a GPS signal from the vehicle they're following, never occurred to me that it was based on image-detection. Cool stuff, thanks!

[dgaddis]

Finally got out for a 'real' flight yesterday. New owner of the old Sears building at a metro Atlanta mall has a HUGE renovation in mind, has already hired an architect and us to do some conceptual design. We did our initial walkthrough of the building yesterday and I took the drone to get 'before' pics/video, both exterior and interior. This building is on the southside of ATL and not too far from the airport (which is the busiest in the world), and it's inside the controlled airspace which goes all the way down to the ground so it's illegal to fly a drone here without authorization from the FAA. Thankfully they have a good system that's easy to use to get authorization. In this particular spot it's on the edge of that controlled airspace and you can get automatic authorization to fly up to 200ft above the ground, you're more or less just letting them know you'll be flying in the area. To fly above that you have to submit a request and a person at the FAA reviews it and either grants or denies it. I wanted top-down photos of the roof, and being a big building we needed to fly higher than 200ft to get those, so we applied and were granted permission to fly up to 400ft above the ground.

Our drone has a system that will alert you to manned aircraft in the area, it was going off constantly haha.

The building owner wanted to see the footage, so when we got back to the office I quickly stuck some of the clips together and uploaded them to YouTube. These are unedited straight off the SD card.

Assuming the project gets approval and goes forward, it'll be a few years before our 'final' video is put together.

[j44ke]

I think you mentioned that the drone could be used to create drawings. Does that also include real-time measurements and locating the building with GPS points? Just wondering. The architects of our house were just visiting to shoot some drone photos of our house, and they have a renovation & expansion project nearby that has no drawings whatsoever, not even surveys locating the house, just the outline of the property. They can create drawings, but being able to somehow use the drone to draw, measure and locate the house so it can be dropped into the survey would be a real time saver for them and money saver for the client. Of course, a formal site survey will be required, but to start the planning process, some sort of quick but accurate drawing would be a big help.

And I am probably not using the right terminology, so let me know if I'm not making sense.

Here's our house from above.



What do you do if the iPhone runs out of batteries while the drone is in the air?

[twowheels]

If I see one of those things over my backyard I'm grabbing a shotgun.

[dgaddis]

I think you mentioned that the drone could be used to create drawings. Does that also include real-time measurements and locating the building with GPS points? Just wondering. The architects of our house were just visiting to shoot some drone photos of our house, and they have a renovation & expansion project nearby that has no drawings whatsoever, not even surveys locating the house, just the outline of the property. They can create drawings, but being able to somehow use the drone to draw, measure and locate the house so it can be dropped into the survey would be a real time saver for them and money saver for the client. Of course, a formal site survey will be required, but to start the planning process, some sort of quick but accurate drawing would be a big help.

And I am probably not using the right terminology, so let me know if I'm not making sense.

What do you do if the iPhone runs out of batteries while the drone is in the air?

I'm FAR FROM an expert on drones, so, talk all of this with a grain of salt.

I believe there are some drones that can create a 3D model of an area that you can drop into a CAD software package, I don't know how dimensionally accurate these are. These drones are much more expensive than the one we have, which really just a flying camera. What we're doing is much less sophisticated, but very effective for what we're doing. We'll take the images and drop them into CAD, scale them as required (we have PDF's of the original drawings for the building from the mid 70's, so we know how big the building is), and sketch over top of it, then eventually delete the image out. For locating existing rooftop HVAC units and gas piping this is a very quick fast way to do so, and reduces the time spent measuring everything on the rooftop - some of that is still required, but you don't have to measure EVERYTHING manually. We don't need super tight accuracy, especially when it comes to existing equipment. We do this now with Google Earth images, but they're not nearly as clear as a photo taken from 300ft, so sometimes you can't tell what you're looking at.

On our drone the phone is basically just a viewfinder, the controller is what actually controls the drone and sends the signal to/from the drone. So if the phone dies, or the app crashes, you can still fly it back just looking at it, or using the 'return to home' button where it flies itself back to where it took off from. You can also have the controller charge the phone while you're using it to make sure it doesn't die, and I think this is actually required for android devices. I don't use that feature on the iphone tho because it's just additional heat being added to the phone, and the current app has issues making the phone get hot in some cases and the app freezes/lags. But as long as you show up with a fully charged phone you'll run out of drone batteries before you run out of phone battery.

[dgaddis]

If I see one of those things over my backyard I'm grabbing a shotgun.

Keep in mind it's not illegal for someone to fly a drone over your house, it's not even illegal for them to film/photograph you in your yard. You don't own the airspace above your property, it's considered a public thoroughfare. Shooting one down IS illegal.

Where it starts getting tricky is some local governments have rules/ordinances outlawing drone use, but if my understanding is correct a few years ago a law was passed that gave the FAA total jurisdiction of airspace in the US, to prevent local jurisdictions from making their own rules, but some of them do it anyway.

I'm not defending someone flying around your backyard, I'm just saying "here's the law". That said, some of the flights I'll be doing in the upcoming weeks to get pics/video of some of our schools we will almost certainly be flying over people's homes, because they surround the school and we have to get far enough back to get a good shot. But we're not interested in random people's property. But I also know no one wants a drone hanging out above their property, so we'll be keeping ours moving haha.

[rec head]

If I see one of those things over my backyard I'm grabbing a shotgun.

Get from above my lawn!

It just doesn't have the same ring to it. Plus if you shoot the drone it will end up on your lawn, probably making you angry a second time.

[j44ke]

I'm FAR FROM an expert on drones, so, talk all of this with a grain of salt.

I believe there are some drones that can create a 3D model of an area that you can drop into a CAD software package, I don't know how dimensionally accurate these are. These drones are much more expensive than the one we have, which really just a flying camera. What we're doing is much less sophisticated, but very effective for what we're doing. We'll take the images and drop them into CAD, scale them as required (we have PDF's of the original drawings for the building from the mid 70's, so we know how big the building is), and sketch over top of it, then eventually delete the image out. For locating existing rooftop HVAC units and gas piping this is a very quick fast way to do so, and reduces the time spent measuring everything on the rooftop - some of that is still required, but you don't have to measure EVERYTHING manually. We don't need super tight accuracy, especially when it comes to existing equipment. We do this now with Google Earth images, but they're not nearly as clear as a photo taken from 300ft, so sometimes you can't tell what you're looking at.

On our drone the phone is basically just a viewfinder, the controller is what actually controls the drone and sends the signal to/from the drone. So if the phone dies, or the app crashes, you can still fly it back just looking at it, or using the 'return to home' button where it flies itself back to where it took off from. You can also have the controller charge the phone while you're using it to make sure it doesn't die, and I think this is actually required for android devices. I don't use that feature on the iphone tho because it's just additional heat being added to the phone, and the current app has issues making the phone get hot in some cases and the app freezes/lags. But as long as you show up with a fully charged phone you'll run out of drone batteries before you run out of phone battery.

Thanks - that makes sense. I couldn't quite figure out how to get from A to B on that. I know from working with surveys and civil engineers and architects, trying to locate something can test one's sanity. I can see where even your method would be a real time (and sanity) saver.

[defspace]

I think you mentioned that the drone could be used to create drawings. Does that also include real-time measurements and locating the building with GPS points?

I believe there are some drones that can create a 3D model of an area...

This stuff is pretty neat, IMO. Here's one of those softwares: https://www.esri.com/en-us/arcgis/pr...e2map/overview



I haven't had the opportunity to use it or any data collected in D2M, so I can't comment on accuracy or anything like that. I know we looked at drones to shoot LiDAR, but I don't think we ever got around to it.

[Tom]

When the couple that bought the farm from my parent's estate blasted the ledge where they were building cabins for people to stay in they posted the film. It was at a perspective where I had to ask them OK, I've climbed all the trees around there and I know I was littler and they grew some since then but none were that high. Where were you to take that?
They said the blaster had a drone. It was rock steady, I was impressed.

Not to thread drift but if anybody wants to know of a cool place to stay in central Vermont with just stupid good dirt road riding right or left out the driveway...