Gender

Male

Location

Adelaide, SA

About Me:

I am in my mid forties and as a kid I would have loved to have been able to afford and fly RC aircraft but lack of money stopped that. I blundered through life working many jobs from linemarker to computer programmer and never realised my RC dreams. I eventually became a typical corporate worker bee forgetting what dreams I had previously had(I even stopped playing my guitar). One day I noticed an extremely cheap RC helicopter at a market stall and flashing back to childhood purchased it. It was a little coax job and I taught myself how to fly it, upsetting the dogs greatly until they got used to it. I quickly upgraded to a Twister Police Helicam as my wife and I now live on our farm in Australia and I wanted to use it to get aerial pictures of a 16 hectare area that we had revegetated a few years back. This ignited a RC addictive spark that then led me to get a Blade 120SR FP heli as the Coax Helicam is useless in ANY wind at all. Having a reasonably large property with all sorts of wildlife(including intruders who may also one day be stock rustlers) I formulated an idea that although it may sound silly and/or paranoid would definitely be fun for me. I have a problem with being easily bored/distracted by things that are shiny or machines that go bing but I suspect this project will keep my attention(finding the money sure will). The 'master UAV plan' is detailed below. NOTE - I am no longer a corporate drone, live on a farm, and we are building our dream home out of poured earth. It is completely off the grid with the only connections to the outside world being a mobile phone signal and a very long driveway/road.

Please tell us a bit about your UAV interest

Liking RC aviation, computers and robots it makes my interest a given. Plus there may be some home security related benefits. What I would like my UAV to do when it is finished is to auto launch upon receipt of a launch signal. Then fly to the GPS coordinates provided with the launch signal, loiter and locate target, lock onto target with video camera using probably a heat sensor or movement tracker of some kind, if target is moving then follow target from the air, beam video signal back to base and if I am not on location send the video stream to my smartphone/pda. I am guessing that I will have to go through a variety of smaller projects to perfect the system that I would like to implement. Regardless, even if I only manage to get half of what I envisage actually working I will be a happy, happy man(ecstatic if I manage the lot). While my brain isn't quite as big as a planet I am pretty handy with computers, programming, learning new skills, and breaking things in the quest to better them. I hope to teach myself many things and meet interesting new people.

Hometown:

Adelaide