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This is a compressed orthomosaic of a 1-ha plot of mallee bushland near the OzFlux tower at the Calperum station located within the Riverland Biosphere Reserve in South Australia. Environment Institute researchers, Lian Pin Koh and Wayne Meyer, spent a day in the bushland mapping this area.

The images were captured using a 3DR Y6 multirotor flying at 40m above ground level carrying a Canon Powershot SX230 running a 1-second intervalometer script (CHDK-hacked firmware). Photos were geotagged using the mission log from the drone.

It was late in the winter afternoon when this particular flight was done. So the light condition was less than ideal. But the images were still reasonably good. The ground resolution of the images was 1.21 cm per pixel.

Click here for the raw images which are freely available for download.

Here's the reg. On a quick read, it appears that the FAA is taking a hard line on drones in commercial faming and FPV flight with googles. Only Hobby and Recreation is allowed without a COA

Regarding FPV, this doesn't sound good:

By definition, a model aircraft must be “flown within visual line of sight of the person operating the aircraft.” Based on the plain language of the statute, the FAA interprets this requirement to mean that: (1) the aircraft must be visible at all times to the operator; (2) that the operator must use his or her own natural vision (which includes vision corrected by standard eyeglasses or contact lenses) to observe the aircraft; and (3) people other than the operator may not be used in lieu of the operator for maintaining visual line of sight. Under the criteria above, visual line of sight would mean that the operator has an unobstructed view of the model aircraft. To ensure that the operator has the best view of the aircraft, the statutory requirement would preclude the use of vision-enhancing devices, such as binoculars, night vision goggles, powered vision magnifying devices, and goggles designed to provide a “first-person view” from the model.

Footnote 2: The FAA is aware that at least one community-based organization permits “first person view” (FPV)  operations during which the hobbyist controls the aircraft while wearing goggles that display images transmitted from a camera mounted in the front of the model aircraft. While the intent of FPV is to provide a simulation of what a pilot would see from the flight deck of a manned aircraft, the goggles may obstruct an operator’s vision, thereby preventing the operator from keeping the model aircraft within his or her visual line of sight at all times.

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Press release here:

Privacy is going to be more difficult to protect than ever in the drone-filled age.

Competitors, thieves, or even just your neighbours could be spying on your every move using a remote-controlled flying camera.

That's the kind of paranoia Domestic Drone Countermeasures (DDC) is hoping to tap into with its new personal drone detection system Kickstarter project - a black box that promises to go beep when a drone flies within 15 metres of its sensors.

"Drones are becoming more capable all the time and this is why it's alarming. They fly with payloads like still cameras, video cameras, infrared detectors, thermal detectors, among other things, and they are already being used for surveillance," DDC founder Amy Ciesielka said.

"Though there are legitimate uses for domestic drones, there is still concern about invasion of privacy and surveillance by various entities."

In the UK it is illegal to fly a drone within 50 metres of a structure even for recreation, while commercial use of drones has to be cleared by the Civil Aviation Authority.

But in the US personal drones are not regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration and can be flown around buildings and built-up areas.

In Hong Kong, all drone flights require approval from the Civil Aviation Department, but enthusiasts have been known to skirt laws with small hobby drones.

DDC has been working on the technology for more than a year and promises to warn users of personal drone snooping before it's too late. The kit cannot detect military drones as "they fly too high and are too sophisticated", according to the company.

The kit consists of three boxes - a primary command and control unit that connects via Wi-fi to the internet, and two sensors that are placed about the home.

If a drone is detected, the command and control unit sends a notification to the user's smartphone, tablet or computer, even while the user is away from home. The kit does not promise to actually block the drone's invasion of privacy, yet.

In April, Robert Knowles became the first person convicted in the UK for "dangerously" flying a drone.

A starter kit costs US$499 on Kickstarter, but as ever with crowd-funded projects, the system may not come to fruition.

http://www.scmp.com/news/world/article/1538483/drone-detector-alerts-you-neighbourhood-spies

Hi All, In the next show of DIY Drones Vodcast we have a project that we have have been following a while on the DIY drones blog post section and this is LOHAN (Low Orbit Helium Assisted Navigator) from The Register. We are glad to say that Lester Haines will be our new guest on the show.

This episode is available on our YouTube channel.

Left To Right

Drew Cullen, Rob Eastwood, Paul Shackleton, Dave Akerman, Anthony Stirk

The vinyl wrapping team in England, April 2014. Aridane is the little girl who designed the Vulture 2 livery

Lester Haines before a test flight launch, April 2014

We're going to be standardizing on built-in Bluetooth for all 3DR vehicles and autopilots in the future, but you don't have to wait for that -- you can use Bluetooth right now with this nifty Bluetooth add-on kit ($24.99). It's pre-set for 3DR gear and sends MAVlink at 57k to any mobile device or laptop running DroidPlanner, AndroPilot, Mission Planner or APM Planner.  I posted a DIY tutorial on how to roll your own BT link a while ago, but for those who don't want the hassle of making cables and configuring radios, we've now done it all for you.

Leave your telemetry radio and OTG cable at home, and make a direct Bluetooth connection to your phone, tablet or laptop for pre-flight mission planning and vehicle setup. It has a range of 30m, which is fine for setup, mission planning and even close FollowMe mode -- all without bulky long-range radios. 

Just plug it into your telemetry port and pair with your device. It's the easiest way to make a telemetry link -- no extra gear required!

Video taken from a TBS Style Quad using a GoPro Hero 3 Silver the camera is mounted on the frame with small vibration mounts and no gimbal.

This is the area surrounding our club flying site near Broughshane, Northern Ireland

David Ardis

Congratulations to Leonard Hall, whose incredibly fast ArduCopter (shown above) won the Sparkfun AVC copter category, and Philip Rowse, whose ArduPlane did the same in fixed wing. In rovers, my own ArduRover came in first in the micro rover category, and there were Pixhawks and APMs throughout all the other categories and contestants. A fantastic day! 

it went well, but....

It is possible, but not as easy as i had hoped.

the biggest problem i had was trying to avoid a crash and inadvertently causing one.

The second problem was build, everything was very bodged which made the aircraft hard to control full stop, without the experimental mods.

I need a 3d printer this would make builds much easier!

so until i can afford one, this will stay on hiatus

But overall the results are promising and my biggest setback is time, i could keep rebuilding using bodged methods but it takes time.

An interesting investigation into 400 crashes by military drones:

From Gizmodo:

The National Parks Service just announced a sweeping ban on drones. The new policy prohibits "launching, landing, or operating unmanned aircraft on lands and waters administered by the National Park Service." Why? Because they're disruptive, that's why.

Drones are already banned in a few national parks, including Yosemite, for the simple fact that they're a noisy nuisance. These flying robots bother park-goers. They bother park rangers. And perhaps most importantly, they bother the wildlife. The Parks Service release even lists infractions:

In April, visitors at Grand Canyon National Park gathered for a quiet sunset, which was interrupted by a loud unmanned aircraft flying back and forth and eventually crashing in the canyon. Later in the month, volunteers at Zion National Park witnessed an unmanned aircraft disturb a herd of bighorn sheep, reportedly separating adults from young animals.

Disturbing the sheep!

Not all hope is lost for hobbyists who want a beautiful backdrop for their aerial drone-o-graphs, though. The Parks Service itself will also continue using drones "for administrative purposes such as search and rescue, fire operations and scientific study." The new policy is described as a "temporary measure" pending a more permanent regulation which "can take considerable time" to get approved.

DroneCon 2014 is now underway at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Although it's not live-streamed, the videos will be on YouTube in a few days. Here's the order of events. 

PROGRAM

9:00-9:25 Chris Anderson, CEO 3D Robotics

State of the Union

9:25-9:45 Randy Mackay, Arducopter Lead Developer

Arducopter overview

9:45-10:05 Kevin Hester, Head of Platform Engineering 3D Robotics

Dronehub API overview

10:05-10:25 Doug Weibel, Aerospace Engineering Science University of Colorado at Boulder

Introduction to the Extended Kalman Filter

10:25-10:40 Leonard Hall, Arducopter Developer

Autotuning on Arducopter

10:40-11:00 Coffee

11:00-11:20 Fergus Noble, CTO Swiftnav

Introduction to Differential GPS

11:20-11:40 Jonathan Challenger

Advancements in magnetometer calibration and compensation

11:40-12:00 Dr. Eric Frew, Associate Professor, Aerospace Engineering Sciences, University of Colorado at Boulder

Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Communication and Atmospheric Sensing Missions

12:00-2:00 Lunch

2:00-2:25 Kevin Hester, Head of Platform Engineering

Dronehub API workshop

2:25-2:45 Jono Millin, Co-founder Drone Deploy

More API

2:45-3:05 Robert Lefebvre, Traditional Helicopter Lead Developer

Introduction to Traditional Helicopter dynamics

3:05-3:25 Chris Miser, Founder Falcon UAV

Anti poaching UAV applications

3:25-3:45 Daniel McKinnon, Co-Founder, Agribotix

UAVs in Agriculture: What do farmers really want?

3:45-4:05 Jamie Mercado, CTO Droidika

Comparison of a conventional survey vs a UAV based survey on an urban setting

4:05-4:25 Danny Coolahan, Cinematographer, Three Legged Lab

Iris in the wild

4:25-5:00 Andrew Tridgell, Arduplane Lead Developer

Keynote

Adafruit has just posted a great tutorial on adding prop guards and cool LEDs to IRIS:

What do I need to know?

If you've soldered a battery or wired up your own drone, you'll be surprised just how easy this project is! If your just starting out, here's a few guides to help you get started.

As you can see, our plucky Playmonaut is back in his seat in the Vulture 2 spaceplane following some work on the aircraft's canards and servo linkages.

We had to swap out a servo after a recent minor melt-down, and took the chance to mount the canards properly. The fire department is on standby, just in case another servo motor goes up in smoke.

Here are the mounted forewings with the Pixhawk fired up...

...and for the viewing pleasure of those of an engineering bent, here's how we bolted them to the aircraft:

We describe the canards as "cantankerous" because they proved somewhat troublesome. The full story is right here.

Jonathan Buckley and his 13-year-old son Kaden (and friend Jack) just had the most epic day using the new and improved ArduCopter Follow-Me mode to have a 3DR Y6 follow a car (carrying an Android tablet). Have you ever seen a better father-son project??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uak5Xvq6Cw4

Not exactly a DIY post but this is a great video by Trimble demonstrating waypoints for an Agriculture/NDVI or Survey application showing off their UX5 flying wing.

In my last blog post i discussed how PRU can be useful in the development of Beaglebone-Linux-Ardupilot based Autopilot. In this blog post i'll be sharing how it is being implemented presently on beaglepilot. PRU-PWM (PWM generation using PRU) is in development stage and there are many possibilities to make it work at its best.

Implementation of PWM generation using PRU is based on the work by Pantelis Antoniou on testpru & driver to go along with it. Initially I worked with AM335x PRU Package for uploading the firmware in binary format. After seeing the power and ease of usage of Pantelis's infrastructure I moved to implement it inside Ardupilot HAL. Pantelis's infrastructure works on the basis of upcalls and downcalls. All three cores constantly keep in touch by raising signals to each other so that they can inform each other what to do next, while data exchange occurs via shared memory. Also sysfs interface is provided so that userspace can communicate with PRUs.

All was perfect until the measurement of time taken for writing PWM value for each channel was found out to be between 500-1000us, which is about 20 times higher than required. The bottleneck in the whole apparatus was sysfs interface, opening, writing and closing of files took a of time. So we had to let go of sysfs interface and thus only purpose of driver was to load the firmware. Another thing we need to let go of is the rproc and virtio implementation done by Pantelis which was unnecessary for Ardupilot and consumed one extra PRU core. So final implementation is as follows: Firmware is loaded to PRU, All pins required as PWM channel (which actually are R31 bits as explained in previous post) are declared to be used using cape manager overlays for now, but will be declared under device tree in future. Ardupilot (Userspace) communicates and exchanges data via placing data directly into Shared Memory via mmap, no signals are raised because communication is between only two devices and simplex type(PRU1 and ARM, PRU0 is not in picture now and will be serving other purposes like PPM reader or sensor data time stamper etc). Data is placed into the shared memory along with access flag, application on both side poll for the access and change the value of access flag data when they have placed it into there local memory(in PRUs case) or writing into shared memory is complete(in ARMs case). Another task in this development is to create an independent firmware loader either in userspace or in kernel space as driver. The firmware loader should be able to load elf files into the PRU. For now Pantelis's driver is handling that task, until everything is going well we can turn a blind eye on independent firmware loader's development.

All in all after making these changes, PWM write time for each channel reduced to 10us with some occasional measured time of 500us-1000us, the reason for which is yet unknown. It would be great if you all can share your views on this implementation.

Regards,

Siddharth Bharat Purohit

Hi guys!

We have rolled out new version of  U[g]CS Beta 1.2.75.

You can download it at  http://UGCS.com/products Please login to site first to access downloads!

We have updated documentation and manuals for connecting supported drones. Please see them here http://ugcs.com/documentation

New in this version:

Redesigned route calculation and drone controls. Now you can add another drone, recalculate route for it and upload data while first is in the air. No need to recalculate whole mission, upload and start all the drones at the same time.

Mikrokopter support has been added.

Right now we support 6 autopilots:

- ArduPilot (copter, plane, rover )

- Pixhawk (field tested with copters, should work with rest as well)

- ArDrone 2.0 with Flight recorder installed

- Mikrokopter

- Microdrones

- UNAV – not field tested and not included in package, if there are crazy guys who would like to give it a try before we do, please let me know! ;)

Things to know:

Password is admin. Who reads manuals nowadays right! ;)

By default mission starting place is our office at Spilve aerodrome, Riga, Latvia. (“Missions”, then “Create new”)

If you wish to explore Riga scroll to the old town SE from our office. There are plenty of 3D buildings to demo obstacle avoidance (calculation could be slow)

Try to find our TV tower, one of tallest buildings in EU ;)

For comfortable navigation to your location please use 2D map, true Earth globe map will be in next release. Additionally in settings you can set coordinates of default location to your desired place.

Known issues:

Annoying stuff we know and are fixing. List available here http://diydrones.com/group/ugcs/forum/topics/known-issues-ugcs-beta-1-2-75

For support and help please join and post at UGCS group here at DIYDrones.com or write to support@ugcs.com

Goodies up for grab!

And now to the best part. If somebody is brave enough to fly his drones with our software for them we have prepared polos with our logos!

Just fly and show us what you did it by sending report to us or publishing your experience here at DIYDrones.com.

All type of feedback is welcome, suggestions, bug reports, impressions, videos, etc.

Rest we need to know is just your address and size :)

There are currently 30 polos up for grabs. We reserve right to add more!

Good luck,

U[g]CS Team

Brian Matherly, one of the developers of the MLT video processing framework started working on an NDVI postprocessing plugin which will make it very easy to create NDVI composite videos from infrablue or other IR/VIS footage.

There already is a working proof of concept at Github.

What is needed now is test footage. If you own a camera which is modified for recording IR footage, e.g. with an Infrablue or similar filter (e.g. the modified Mobius from Publiclab.org) , please post links to that footage in the comments! The more different footage the developers get, the easier the developing of the plugin will be.