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A comment on Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Please include URL.

Re:Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Pl... by iamleppert on Thursday March 10, 2016 @01:26PM (#11260964)
Kespry - http://www.kespry.com/

We provide a drone to the (primarily aggregates/mining) industry that can create highly detailed survey quality maps. Our customers can use the data in measuring the volume of their material (stockpiles) and in planning a big project, construction, etc. Basically anything you can imagine someone would need information about a physical location from above.

We develop the full stack in house. In that I mean electronics (PCB board level), drone hardware (mechanical), low-level embedded software, and flight controller software. We also develop an iPad app that allows customers to easily operate the drone autonomously.

We also do all the data processing, using photogrammetry and open source mapping frameworks and tools (gdal) and provide users with a web interface via our Cloud platform for them to view, manipulate and download their data.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Pl... by cscharenberg on Thursday March 10, 2016 @03:52PM (#11262195)
Surveying with drone fleets is going to be huge across many industries. Agriculture and animal husbandry, surveying hard-to-reach things like bridge structures, inside large engines and mechanical systems. Very neat
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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Pl... by cprayingmantis on Thursday March 10, 2016 @02:56PM (#11261799)
Hey that's pretty awesome have you thought about applications of this tech in agriculture? Perhaps keeping an eye out on crops and trying to predict yields or crop health?
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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Pl... by brobinson on Thursday March 10, 2016 @03:46PM (#11262152)
My first thought was futures trading. I've heard of people using their own private satellites to do something similar. There was a company in SF building and launching small, shoebox-sized satellites inexpensively which could be used for it.
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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Pl... by kartikkumar on Thursday March 10, 2016 @04:49PM (#11262679)
I suspect you're referring to Planet Labs: https://www.planet.com
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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Pl... by brobinson on Friday March 11, 2016 @08:42PM (#11270869)
That was it!
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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Pl... by wfn on Friday March 11, 2016 @08:16AM (#11266386)
Yep, if you are able to gather data over near-infrared (NIR) as well as red channels, you can compute NDVI which is a kind of vegetation index. It's interesting stuff and I would look into using the tech for agriculture surveys, constant monitoring and automatic advisory compilation (where to water things etc.)
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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Pl... by karambahh on Thursday March 10, 2016 @02:43PM (#11261683)
This is a great product.

It solves an actual issue (that I had never thought about since I'm very far from that field :-) ) in a simple and clever way.

You deserve the award of the most original and useful use of drone tech I've seen.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Pl... by D3_4dl1N3 on Saturday March 12, 2016 @12:05PM (#11273522)
Here some practical applications for drones: https://img.readitlater.com/i/cloudtweaks.com/wp-content/upl...
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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Pl... by troncheadle on Thursday March 10, 2016 @02:23PM (#11261473)
Holy crap this is so cool. So cool! I'm a JR full stack dev, mainly proficient in JS technologies, and I have a cheap drone with a wifi camera. What would you recommend that I study to start getting involved with autonomous drone programming for fun?
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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Pl... by iamleppert on Thursday March 10, 2016 @02:55PM (#11261785)
There are many open source flight controllers. My best advice would be to research and decide on one, then build a small fixed wing, helicopter, or multirotor. You'll learn a lot in the process of building vs. just buying something and while a longer project, it's certainly within the realm of hobbyist and there are huge communities to support you.

Most of open source flight controllers support MavLink, a communications protocol that you can use to send path commands and receive telemetry info over a WiFi link. There are wrappers for many languages, including node.

It's good to have a project in mind of what you want it to actually do in the end before you start that will help guide you through the process.

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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Pl... by innertracks on Thursday March 10, 2016 @06:08PM (#11263264)
Sounds fun! I've been thinking of ways and places to mix my database, software dev, and commercial pilot/flight instructor backgrounds.
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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Pl... by mladenkovacevic on Thursday March 10, 2016 @04:42PM (#11262626)
Were you guys at the PDAC this week?
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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Pl... by viperscape on Thursday March 10, 2016 @05:51PM (#11263159)
do you sell the cloud services? that'd be a neat niche too
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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Pl... by tonyhb on Thursday March 10, 2016 @02:25PM (#11261495)
This looks amazing.
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Re:Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it awesome? Pl... by LAMike on Thursday March 10, 2016 @02:50PM (#11261739)
Looks amazing
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