Discussions

Hi everyone, glad to be a new member of DIYDrones.  

I will start off with a little introduction of myself, and what my endgame is for the drone that I want to build.  I am currently studying Agriculture at the University of Saskatchewan, in Canada.  This past summer I had the opportunity to play with a UAV known as the swingletCam (http://www.sensefly.com/products/swinglet-cam).  The time I had to use this product made my curiosity start running with ideas on how to implement this kind of technology into Agriculture.  But unfortunately the swingletCAM costs around $15,000 which is way out of my price range.  But then I found your community and realized that maybe I could build something at a much more reasonable cost.  Well enough with my life story.

What I am looking for is building an airframe around this camera - XNiteCanonELPH300NDV - at http://www.maxmax.com/vegetation_stress_mkii.htm.  

The UAV must be able to make flight times of 30-60min to cover fields that range from 160-640ac.

Once I have the images I want to create a geo-referenced mosaic by stitching all the individual images together.  From there I want to import them into QuantumGIS or GRASS and do some additional analysis.  

I am hoping you guys can suggest an reasonably priced airframe that can work for what I am trying to do. I have seen that the baxter or baxter2 models might work well.  Also the techpod might be useful as well.  I know I am probably missing some other necessary information so thanks for any help you can give to me and if you have any questions, I will answer to the best of my knowledge.