Archive of posts with tag 'drones'

Weekend Reading: Options Over Roadmaps, Ghost, and Spaced Repetition

September 12, 2020 • #

šŸ›£ Options, Not Roadmaps

An option is something you can do but donā€™t have to do. All our product ideas are exactly that: options we may exercise in some future cycleā€”or never.

Without a roadmap, without a stated plan, we can completely change course without paying a penalty. We donā€™t set any expectations internally or externally that these things are actually going to happen.

I know Basecamp is always the industry outlier with these things, but the thoughts on roadmaps are probably more true for many companies in reality than weā€™d all like...

Weekend Reading: How We Collect Data, Mapping the Camp Fire, and Earth's Great Unconformity

January 5, 2019 • #

šŸ—ŗ How We Get Data Collected in the Field Ready for Use

My colleagues Bill Dollins and Todd Pollard (the core of our data team), wrote this post detailing how we go from original ground-based data collection in Fulcrum through a data processing pipeline to deliver product to customers. A combination of PostGIS, Python tools, FME, Amazon RDS, and other custom QA tools get us from raw content to finished, analyst-ready GEOINT products.

šŸ”„ Mapping the Camp Fire with Drones

The 518 coordinated flights operation, by 16 Northern California emergency responder agencies, is one of...

OpenDroneMap

October 24, 2018 • #

Since I got the Mavic last year, I havenā€™t had many opportunities to do mapping with it. Iā€™ve put together a few experimental flights to play with DroneDeploy and our Fulcrum extension, but outside of that Iā€™ve mostly done photography and video stuff.

OpenDroneMap came on a scene a couple years ago as a toolkit for processing drone imagery. Iā€™ve been following it loosely through the Twittersphere since. Most of my image processing has been done with DroneDeploy, since weā€™d been working with them on some integration between...

Weekly Links: Ambient Computers, Drones, and Focus

June 1, 2017 • #

šŸ’» The Disappearing Computer

For his final weekly column of his long career, Walt Mossberg talks about what he calls ā€œambient computingā€, the penetration of IoT, AR, VR, and computers throughout our lives:

I expect that one end result of all this work will be that the technology, the computer inside all these things, will fade into the background. In some cases, it may entirely disappear, waiting to be activated by a voice command, a person entering the room, a change in blood chemistry, a shift in temperature, a motion. Maybe even just a thought. Your whole...

Aerial imagery with the Mavic

April 24, 2017 • #

At work weā€™ve been building an integration between Fulcrum and DroneDeploy, a service for automating drone flight and data capture for aerial imagery. Itā€™s compatible with the Mavic, so I gave it a shot with some test flights over my house.

The idea is simple: use DroneDeploy to draw on a map the area you want to survey from above, and their app handles building the flight plan, sending it to the drone, and flying the waypoints to take all the photos. You then take the pictures from the droneā€™s storage and upload to your DroneDeploy project for processing....

Weekly Links: OSM on AWS, Fulcrum Editor, & Real-time Drone Maps

April 21, 2017 • #

Querying OpenStreetMap with Amazon Athena šŸ—ŗ

Using Amazonā€™s Athena service, you can now interactively query OpenStreetMap data right from an interactive console. No need to use the complicated OSM API, this is pure SQL. Iā€™ve taken a stab at building out a replica OSM database before and itā€™s a beast. The dataset now clocks in at 56 GB zipped. This post from Seth Fitzsimmons gives a great overview of what you can do with it:

Working with ā€œthe planetā€ (as the data archives are referred to) can be unwieldy. Because it contains data spanning the...

Mavic Pro First Impressions

April 19, 2017 • #

I bought a Mavic Pro a couple weeks ago and just got a chance to take my first flights this past weekend. In short, itā€™s the most impressive technology product Iā€™ve used in years. Iā€™ve never owned any drone, so this is pretty cool for someone in the mapping industry. Letā€™s dive in.

Mavic Pro

Since going out to fly aerial mapping missions with some partners of ours a couple months back, I wanted to buy one of DJIā€™s drones ā€” either the larger Phantom 4 Pro, or the smaller Mavic. Extensive research led...

New York City Flyover

December 13, 2010 • #

Someone attached HD video cameras to an RC airplane and flew it all around the urban environments of New York City.

The shots flying down the towers of the Verrazano Bridge and around the head of the Statue of Liberty are breathtaking.