Topic: Drones

[Rivers]

Anyone here other than me been bitten by the drone bug? I fly mine most days, it's a Dji Mavic Mini. I find it very relaxing, right up until I turn right, and it goes left, behind the barn As it goes out of sight I have to squint at the screen and fly it FPV (first person view) to get it back under control. Not the drone's fault, direction is relative to the aircraft apparently, not the turkey pushing the sticks on the ground.

I'm getting quite better every day though I do go backwards occasionally.

[eric]

I'm mostly retired now, but in my line of work drones have made a dramatic change.  Aerial surveys are a really valuable tool, but expensive, involving fixed wing aircraft or sometimes helicopters, and LIDAR was very expensive.  Now, an engineer, surveyor or scientist can do this solo from the ground with nominal expense and training by comparison.  Pretty amazing really.   What I don't like about them is that occasionally hobbyists or real estate folks will fly them very close to us, which I find incredibly intrusive.  But they seem fun.

[Rivers]

I'm very lucky to have 110 acres of farm, forest, ponds, buildings and hills to fly over. I try not to fly over my neighbors, or anyone else not expecting it!

There's a learning curve to be sure. Surviving the first few flights and learning not to push my luck trying to fly through too small gaps or in too strong a wind have been key.

I was craving a challenge and new creative outlet; learning to fly a quadcopter was just the ticket. It's also gotten me into video editing using Final Cut Pro X. I'm really enjoying learning FCPX, it's serious software with a ton of functionality.

[David Kaatz]

And I thought you were going to be talking about drone tones or drone strings!

[Stuart]

There's a park here where last summer on occasion they set up a course where people would fly their drones around. I only watched for a couple of minutes, but it looked like fun. The course was in an area about the size of a soccer field and it appeared that it required maneuvering the drones around different things, through openings, with different maneuvers along the way. I guess it was timed. The drones were relatively small. As a hobby, I'm sure the possibilities are endless.

[Rivers]

Certainly it's leisure time but with a lot of payback for time invested. The evolution of high def digital video and still captures from the stabilized cameras on the current generation of 'prosumer' drones have elevated quadcopters from toys to semi-pro flying cameras. The other evolutionary leap has been in the quality and integration of sensors, computing power and software. In my case drones are at the intersection of multiple interests, photography, computing and flight. They are literally flying computers with HD image capture.

The unexpected bonus was being inspired into learning Final Cut for editing the gigabytes of video files coming off this thing. I've been working with it for a month and have gotten up the initially steep learning curve to a plateau where I know how to do the editing basics. For the time I've invested in it I'd better pay up for the full version, $299, I've been running the 1 month free trial up to now. I learn more every day, in the air and on my desktop, which I value highly as an old guy.