I just wanted to share a mapping mission I ran last week with the E382 from Event 38 (my company) and processed with DroneMapper.com.
The reason these results are somewhat noteworthy is the amount of time it took to make this. I pulled up to the flying field, setup the plane in maybe 5 or 6 minutes. I hand launched the plane, flew around manually for exactly 5 minutes, taking 110 pictures in that time. Brought it in for a quick landing in some bushes then I packed up and went home. At home I uploaded the images straight to DroneMapper without even reviewing them. A few hours later, DM came back with really awesome results. All of this took just a few minutes of my time not counting the drive to and from the field.
My setup on the E382 is as follows:
- Skywalker 168cm Airframe
- APM 2.0 with ArduPlane 2.4
- 3DR Telemetry Radios 915MHz
- Canon Powershot SX230 HS with CHDK
The camera is really what made this so quick.. with built in GPS all the images are geotagged automatically as they're taken. This mission was actually done to see if it could keep a GPS lock for the entire flight which it did. Having the images geotagged and processing them with DroneMapper returns files that can be analyzed (as in the image above) for things like the elevation profile of any path, the length of a path, the area of a field and so on. There are nice tutorials on how to get started with that in the DroneMapper FAQ.
Measuring the length of a trail
Measuring the area of low lying vegetation
Extracting the coordinates of a point of interest
Comments
@nuno yes there's always room for improvement!
@John the altitude actually varied a LOT on this flight from as low as 50m when the camera started taking pics during take off to the end when I got up to about 130m AGL above the high terrain.
@Richard Thanks. No there's no stabilization on the camera itself, the small angles that you'll get from flying can be dealt with by DroneMapper, it expects that. What problems are you having with the images?
Hi Jeff, you've done really well there, I can't seem to get those results with an ixus 80 IS and CHDK. Are you using any kind of camera servo stabilisation? Or simply flying the plane on rails?!
Cheers, R
Nice, what altitude were you flying at?
oh congrat about Dronemapper site and many thanks for the GeoTag Time sync hint !
Well done, but, yes one thing to improve is the camera to use, more megapixel, better work , and most of the times faster work.
The samsung cameras, are fine, i don't know if it's possible to use the chdk.
Hi manu, yes it's possible even without GPS cameras. The Mission planner has a tool to geotag images from the APM logs based on image timestamps. The trick is getting the right time offset to match up GPS time with your camera's timestamp. An easy way to help yourself in that process is to set your camera's clock to GPS time. The only place I know that has any more info on it is the Dronemapper FAQ under the section titled "Ardu Geotag Hints & Time Sync Information"
Well done Jeff, that's looking good!
Wondering if you can acheive the same quick result from the other Canon (A2200), which doesn't include a GPS? Maybe with the addition of the APM log in a way or another?
Yes I've been down that road before.. I was also using CHDK at that time but I was sending pulses from APM to CHDK to tell ti when to take a picture. It ended up being too messy in the plane, too much work to set up and it needed a ground script aftwards to match up when the pulses were sent to the picture that was subsequently taken. This method is much simpler and in the future more and more and more cameras will have a GPS option.
I have no idea why but almost no cameras have an intervalometer feature. Seems so easy to include, I'm not sure why almost no companies add it.
subscribe... thanks to share ! i'm having a bad time to find a camera that work well with USB trigger gadget...wanted to use a new 16pmx model... but canon CHDK doesnt seem to support them... actually trying to hack a NIKON s9300...
Thanks
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