FromAGBeat (via Hacker News)

New Hampshire bill proposes aerial photography ban

Neal Kurk (R), member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives since 1986 has recently sponsored HB 619-FN to make aerial photography illegal in their state, which many are considering a look into the future. States are currently struggling with how to deal with advances in drone technology, particularly mini-drones, fueled by fears not only that the federal government is using drones on U.S. soil, but are using them abroad not only to take out terrorists, but suspected terrorists, even if American.

Much media attention has been showered on the topic, bringing light to the full array of uses, not just the CIA’s implementation of the technologies. According to Fox News, the Federal Aviation Administration has already granted 327 licenses, and it projects as many as 10,000 licensed systems by 2017.

New Hampshire’s proposed aerial photography ban states the following:

"A person is guilty of a class A misdemeanor if such person knowingly creates or assists in creating an image of the exterior of any residential dwelling in this state where such image is created by or with the assistance of a satellite, drone, or any device that is not supported by the ground. This prohibition shall not apply where the image does not reveal forms identifiable as human beings or man-made objects. In this paragraph, “dwelling” means any building, structure, or portion thereof which is occupied as, or designed or intended for occupancy as, a residence by one or more individuals."

Potential problems with this bill

Although the bill seeks to protect residents from being spied on or documented, it very clearly excludes government officials who may use drones for official business. Most protests against drones are not against hobbyists, Google Maps satellites, or aerial photographers, rather against the government’s use of the devices.

The aerial photography ban is unclear as to the very specific non-threatening uses of aerial devices such as aerial real estate photography for listings, or if a homeowner is photographing their own home, and while it states that “This prohibition shall not apply where the image does not reveal forms identifiable as human beings or man-made objects,” possibly implying that if no human is in any photo or video taken, it is acceptable.

Additionally, it is unclear the implications of this bill on existing Google maps or existing images that have been taken via aerial device, and videography does not seem to be clearly addressed in the bill.

Fines for violations of a bill that could spread to other states

Rep. Kurk proposes a fine for violating the aerial photography ban, costing $62.71 per case in fiscal year 2014, rising to $64.40 per case thereafter, with an estimated $10,000 burden on taxpayers should someone appeal, and of course the $35,000 per year prison cost per person that fails to pay and is arrested.

Real estate photographer Larry Lohrman said, “Based on the public discussion that I’ve seen on this subject, I’m going to go out on a limb and make a wild guess and predict that this is not going to be an isolated incident. My guess is that other states will be doing this too. Particularly since so many cities are resisting use of UAVs by law enforcement.”

The full bill is here.

A recent video I made showing the goggles.

Unmanned aircraft have proved their prowess against al Qaeda. Now they’re poised to take off on the home front. Possible missions: patrolling borders, tracking perps, dusting crops. And maybe watching us all?

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/unmanned-flight/horgan-text

http://www.joemcnally.com/blog/2013/02/19/unmanned-flight-in-the-geographic/

The Project linkall has been founded by Jiaqi Hu and Zebo Sun since Oct 2011. Linkall is considered to be the pioneer in the drones delivery system, which has been developed and researched by our team with all the curiosity and enthusiasm for such a new field.

The technological solution of fully automated end to end drones delivery system by linkall is not just a drone for transportation and delivery, but an totally autocratic and continuous working system. In the very near future, the convenient service provided by linkall will become an indispensable part of your life. Especially, we do not only provide service to urban residents, instead, we hope to serve all the people who need it with no charge, especially those in remote areas.

The making of

Our website：linkall.cc

follow us on twitter  @linkallcc

If you haven't already seen this thread, the Techpods have arrived! we got them all unloaded and we're going to start shipping them this weekend!
i did an unboxing video so you guys can see what comes in the box and i explain a bit of how the plane goes together. 

expect a build video soon! 

This was a quick test at Dolphin Research Center  to see if a peduncle band if visible from the air using low cost equipment. The dolphins have been trained to wear the bands. The peduncle bands are used in case of a hurricanes to be able to identify the dolphins if they get washed out to sea in a storm. Because the dolphins do not have the skills needed to feed themselves it is critical that they are found quickly.

The main focus of this project is to build hex and quads that will be used to rescue injured and entangled manatees in the Keys. It is currently a time consuming and expensive to rescue these endangered animals often taking day to locate an injured animal. 

Before you get stared

This was filmed with 6 spotters early in the day before many people were on the grounds. You can see a couple of young kid come up to the fence towards the end.......time to stop

Now we just have to think in MavLink!

From IO9

Temporary electronic tattoos could soon help people fly drones with only thought and talk seemingly telepathically without speech over smartphones, researchers say. Electrical engineer Todd Coleman at the University of California at San Diego is devising noninvasive means of controlling machines via the mind, techniques virtually everyone might be able to use.

Stefan a member of VirtualRobotix community from spain , doing a great job , one years ago send me first revision of openpilot revision of firmware for VRBrain. 

After some times of development yesterday , doing me a great news,  Stefan send me the VRBrain patch for TauLab project , a fork of openpilot project fully compatible with VRBRAIN.

He add the support of VRBrain directly inside the main code of autopilot and also inside the CGS as is possible to see in the screenshot.

He doing also first flight test :

this is the first video doing in indoor

and outdoor

The test is doing in a windy and cold days.

In this attachment you found the file for upgrade the bootloader of vrbrain and use TauLabs project.

You need to add the patch to original TauLab project here the code : https://github.com/TauLabs/TauLabs

This is the VR Brain Patch

https://code.google.com/p/vrbrain/downloads/detail?name=VRBrain-Tau-Labs.rar&can=2&q=#makechanges

Now the FoxTeam start to check the code and fly it , if some one interest to alfa stage of testing is welcome :)

Thanks a lot for your work Stefan !!! :)

Original Blog Post :http://www.virtualrobotix.com/profiles/blogs/not-only-arducopter32-on-vrbrain-now-is-available-also-taulab-pro

Wootwoot!

 They are here everyone!

That's a lot of techpods. I will start shipping tomorrow. Still have to work so the majority will be shipped Friday and Saturday when I will be having work parties with a few friend coming over for beer and pizza.

Thanks to the diydrones community for helping make this happen.

wayne

Following their recent work filming the Monte Carlo Rally with a multirotor, FS Aviation has released a new video providing insight into their activities at Rally Sweden, which took place from 7-10 February 2013 in Karlstad, Sweden.

FS Aviation were able to capture dynamic imagery in tricky conditions using their eight-rotor octocopter, with ambient temperatures dipping as low as minus 25 degrees centigrade.

View the video here: Video: Multirotor Captures Dynamic Race Footage at Rally Sweden

If anyone in the group has or knows of anyone that has been shutdown for commercial sUAS use would you please contact me.

roryp at volt aerial robotics dot com

Thanks

Rory

I did Manfred Dickgiesser foam ear plug mounting for my 450 flamewheel quad with APM 2.5 running v2.9.1 and   MPU6K_FILTER = 20.  APM is mounted on a thin aluminum plate with double-sided foam tape.  A ¼" thick plate of Polycarbonate plastic is taped to the bottom of the aluminum plate between the orange foam ear plugs to give added mass to the mounting assembly. The ear plugs are glued to the top plate of the quad frame with Goop.  Seems to work well for controlling XYZ Accel's.  Z data value analysis in an Excel spreadsheet shows a Standard Deviation of 2.02 for continuous 2300 sample points. 

The ear plugs survived their first crash.  I accidently switched into RTL without knowing and flew it into the ground. 

I would have never thought to use foam ear plugs for vibration mounting.  What a cool idea...

Diydrones Instagram Account - Click Here!

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Drone Cafe Youtube Video Uploads

Hi All

I have just finished moving the design of the APM2.5v2 PCB to Altium AD13 and have attached it here. This will only work with the latest version of Altium (version 13)

the parts have been made into a library as well.

Please use the original EAGLE files as you primary reference, as I cannot be sure that I transferred everything correctly.

It has been a while but I am back at it . I made my first video the other day and with the help of Rainer Keller  and Chris Anderson  I finally figured out the path to post it on here to  show you guys. 

I Got a Midland XTC200 personal action cam strapped it to my Radian Pro and went flying . At my place on the farm there is a 150 foot cliff down to Lake Erie . The wind was blowing  30 knots up  over the cliff. (when you are eager to try something new,  sometimes reason takes the back seat !) I launched the plane,  about 100 feet up it caught the wind shear and was immediately blown 1/4 mile down wind."It was a Hand full"and I managed to land OK  right side up.

 Some of you guys might be wondering how my scratch built Aluminum air plane with the 32 EDF  turned out ? I assembled all the pieces and hung it from a rafter in the barn with the tail down and the nose up at full power it barely" hoovers " not  The performance I am looking for I want it to be able to climb straight up from stationary at half throttle . The Battery is way heavier than I had anticipated . (all you experienced guys can say "  Ha Ha I told You so!") My options are get a second EDF(make the same mistake twice) a Gas turbine or a 50cc Gas propeller engine . Meanwhile my radian pro is starting to show it's age I bought a Multiplex Easy Star a while back (box of foam) The radian is still flying down the road I am going to "Morph" The radian pro into the Multiplex  It is going to have an aluminum "Spine down the center joining the two haves together . You guys have a Great day!

A great post from Sabine at Robohub:

TED just released an excellent talk (screenshot above; embedding isn't working) by Michael Dickinson from the University of Washington about how flies fly.

For years now, roboticists and biologists have been working together to understand how natural and man-made systems fly. We actually organized a conference on that topic in 2007 called Flying Insects and Robots, where Dickinson was one of the keynote speakers. The questions that most often arise are “how do you build a machine that flies” and “how do you control the behavior of these flyers”?

To tackle the first question, Dickinson’s lab built the Dynamically-Scaled Flapping Robot, or Robofly. The video below shows its assembly, but you can see it in action in his TED talk. The robotic model had a 60 cm wingspan, could flap around 5 times a second, and was immersed in 2 tons of mineral oil. By measuring instantaneous forces and flow patterns, his lab was able to explore aerodynamics of flapping flight.

To answer the second question, his lab uses high-tech fly arenas (fly-o-rama, fly-o-vision and rock-n-roll arena) that control the visual surrounding of the fly and record behavioral and neuronal activity. Insight gathered from such experiments, for example on how flies use optic flow to navigate an environment, have inspired a large number of robotic systems. Optic flow can be understood as the speed at which an image moves on the surface of your eye. If you’re in a car, looking at a distant mountain, the image of the mountain will move very little on your retina. If you are about to slam into a wall, the image of the wall will expand very rapidly. Large optic flow can tell you that an object is close. Optic flow is interesting for robots because it only requires very simple sensors (see Centeye sensor below) and processing.

The lab where I worked before at EPFL had lots of examples of how simple flying robots could use optic flow for 3D obstacle avoidance. The video below shows a flying wing that uses optic flow sensors found in your typical computer mouse to avoid the ground and obstacles.

Finally, going back to biology, one of Dickinson’s recent papers explores the reaction of real flies to moving objects, in this case a fly-sized robot (flyatar). Results showed that, similar to interactions between pairs of flies, walking female flies freeze in response to objects that move from back-to-front, wherease they ignore objects that move from front-to-back.

Here is a small video of the setup showing a flyatar tracking a fly, or being controlled by a joystick:

You can check Michael Dickinson’s lab website for more fly related material.

This weekend I was in Davos, flying with my Twinstar / Ardupilot / Gopro. Just beautiful:

The flight was autonomous by waypoints expect the landing, flying hight max 400m above ground.

I use a Twinstar2 with stock brushless setup and a Gopro 3 white edition.

200 mW TX on a 120mAh Lipo runs about 30 mins. Total weight with Lipoly 6.2 Grams, only 3.6 Grams with a 5V regulator so it runs of the main battery. The image is not great on a single Lipo cell. I will try it connected to a spare port on the RX see what the signal is like.

Generate video and OSD with Arduino

This setup could be used with Arduino and this Video overlay shield

And this very small light Arduino its possible  to create a OSD and FPV system under 10 grams

Femtoduino, Smallest Arduino compatible board 

Could reduce the size and weight of my MK1 Arduino / Xbee remote significantly

Simple Arduino Xbee Remote Control TX RX

With this camera you need to block out the light from the back of this camera of the PCB tracks show in the video feed. It needs a light enclosure for the whole assembly, nice and thin so it won't drag too much on top of a wing of where ever.The wires on the camera are a little fragile so I potted them in hot glue so they don't fatigue.

 

• Overlay text and graphics onto a video signal from a camera, DVR, DVD player, VCR or any other source of composite video.
• Capture low-res video image frames for display or video processing. Give your Arduino the gift of sight!
• Perform object detection for computer vision projects.
• Decode NTSC closed captioning or XDS (extended data services) data embedded in television broadcasts.
• Works with NTSC (North America, parts of South America and Asia) or PAL (most of the rest of the world) television standards. For more info on what TV standards see the map here and this list of countries and their standards
• Uses digital pins 2, 6, 7, 8, and optionally 9. Uses analog pin 2
• Designed for Arduino Uno, Duemilanove and equivalents. Does not work on Leonardo or Mega (more info here).

All of these capabilities are demonstrated on the projects page.

How does it work?
The Video Experimenter uses an LM1881 video sync separator to detect the timing of the vertical and horizontal sync in a composite video signal. An enhanced version of the TVout library (available below) uses this sync timing information to overlay content onto the video signal. The ATmega328 microcontroller on the Arduino includes an analog comparator that can be used to detect the brightness of the video signal at any given point in time. Using this brightness information, low-res monochrome image capture into the TVout frame buffer is possible. The ability to capture image information in memory lets you implement simple computer vision experiments.
It's important to note that this shield will not work on the Arduino Mega. Read this for more information (it's not my fault!). The Video Experimenter will work on the Seeeduino Mega with some jumper wires. Read this for more information.

I stumbled upon this... um... interesting video on Youtube.  Amazingly over 500,000 people have already watched it.  I think for the most part it's just some guys having fun with guns.  But it's another interesting insight into the growing fearmongering about domestic drones.

The statement that "The first person to shoot down a drone will be folk hero" is probably quite true I think.