I've seen hundreds of photos from the summit looking out, thousands of photos looking toward the summit from below, but this is the first time I saw a photo that really gives a feel for how much room there is at the summit. The point in the video shortly after he releases the drone at 1min 57sec feels like seeing the Earth from a spaceship or satellite for first time -- it's a perspective I'd never seen before.
Because of it's geography (only high peak in a plain), climbing mount Fuji gave me pretty much the same vibe, except that the landscape is quite different and it's doable by most people without risking your life.
Agreed. I've watched a few Everest documentaries over the years. The camera work in the ones I saw doesn't quite give me an overall sense of the space. This was very nice to see.
Skydio is an American company and is ahead of DJI technically, at least for now. Better obstacle avoidance, a beacon for tracking shots, and (this is the best one) you can fly the drone through a path and set splines in 3d space, which the drone will then fly for you as many times as you want.
I don't own one, just a fun little DJI Mini 2, but it's only a matter of time.
The US isn't the EU, but I have negative trust in DJI (that is, I assume they're doing dastardly things with their huge firehose of data) and figure Skydio has a reputation to maintain if they want to differentiate, so neutral and even slightly positive.
I hope Skydio learns from Apple that privacy is something consumers who don't want the cheapest Chinese model of something demand, and does a better and more consistent job of delivering it.
Skydio doesn't have anything in the EU hot market (under 250 grams; over that weight you have limitations). If you do not trust DJI you can just use a different application to fly the drone instead of DJI Fly; Litchi is the best I think.
Litchi also adds a lot of customizable fly patterns (e.g. follow), and I can confirm that DJI apps have no idea that these other flights happened (to my annoyance, as I actually liked the DJI flight logs feature).
This also means anyone can use the SDK DJI created to run their own drones. If I get a lot of time I might be tempted, though my drone will probably die to my code..
I keep stumbling over the Skydio, they look quite impressive, and I think almost what I am looking for but all their inspection videos are tailored towards relatively big structures (factories, RF towers, ...)
Does any company make an indoor capable drone that can fly a fixed path (through a house). It does not really matter how fast it is, and it does not need to be a strong drone.
"All" I want is to walk through a house with a drone, capturing the video and then have it repeat the same path over and over again autonomously. I don't even care about obstacle avoidance beyond the most basic "stop if you can't move to the next point"
That, when it was announced would have been exactly what I was looking for, but it got kinda silent since then. So I am not sure how well that actually works and where it currently stands
That's an interesting idea, but also gives me the creeps. Amazon's proprietary software controlling a free-roaming camera that can move about nearly my entire house.
I have started experimenting with a DJI Tello and ORBSLAM but I would like to have at least a little less of a toy like drone that can stream the camera and accept remote commands
I have looked at the Tello on and off for awhile because it is supposed to be programmable in Go (https://gobot.io/documentation/platforms/tello/). Your impression seems negative, can you elaborate?
Sorry if that came over as negative. I really like what they did with it. I am using it in python and getting a video stream into OpenCV and sending commands to the drone is stupidly simple.
If you are on the fence I'd say just buy it, it's quite cheap and is great for experimenting.
The reasons why I would like something like the Avata are:
* I want something that does not rely on Wifi but has their own transmission system (DJI is really top of the market here) because it should fly around a two story house where I can't guarantee coverage
* and I don't want to deal with switching networks (the goal will be switching between multiple houses and flying the route recorded for that specific house)
* and a better camera (the Tello is a toy camera). I would go for adding a naked GoPro but that's a hack
* and if all stars align, something that has indoor path following already built in
FWIW I'm trying to build this. We're not targeting consumers initially, but maybe in the long run for your kind of use cases. contact info in about, happy to chat more about your use case.
I saw a YouTube video of a drone following a spline path, shooting day, dusk and night video then the YouTuber blending it altogether, very impressive.
I had been searching for it on YouTube thinking it was a DJI video, I’m fairly sure it was, hence me not finding it.
I don't see how they are ahead. They have drones that are more expensive and with artificial restrictions, I don't think that's the right approach to try to compete with a market leader
Those are your words, not mine. But having a product that has less features and is more expensive is probably not the best approach, I guess they are playing the "made in the us" card.
edit: Ohh, you work for skydio, I should've guessed. I wish you and your team a successful spam campaign.
> edit: Ohh, you work for skydio, I should've guessed. I wish you and your team a successful spam campaign.
There's no need to be nasty. They were just asking if you thought copying the market leader was a good idea. Personally I'd pay more for the Made in the USA product if it has the features I need (not necessarily the "most" features)
I wanted to post the same question, but you beat me to it. I would really like to buy a "not-made-China" drone. For me it is just for fun & tinkering, but I can imagine that there is a significant market for it (government, military, schools,...).
I'm sure there are ways, but I guess a lot of nefarious things one could do with a drone product get a lot harder if you don't also make the finished system assembled from those parts and the software controlling the whole thing.
> What secret and hidden, nefarious things could those reasonably be?
Collecting photo and video footage combined with GPS data without the explicit consent of the owner would be the biggest one, IMO. That would be a great way to build maps of areas that aren't visible from satellites, or to get more detailed imagery than a satellite, or to build full 3D maps of areas using photogrammetry or similar.
Just the GPS data could also be very useful, as it would be a map of the space that drones are likely to be able to fly through. If someone has a 3D map of areas where consumers successfully flew drones, seems like that would make it much easier to send semi- or fully-autonomous drones through there too, if the area were of interest. The US Navy has a problem with mystery drones surveilling their ships, so it seems reasonable to assume that folks are doing the same with sensitive facilities on land. Maybe it would even be useful for plotting flight routes for cruise missiles, so they can stay as close to the ground as possible?
Capturing wifi access point information, like some mapping companies have done, could be beneficial to an organization that doesn't have traditional mapping vehicles. Same for any other radio signals that the device can pick up.
All of that is more or less passive, with the exception of sending the data somewhere. There are a lot more options if the manufacturer is willing to be more aggressive and risk someone noticing that their products are behaving oddly.
Yeah, imagine war starts in Taiwan. The Chinese government “asks” DJI for a set of all photos taken anywhere near US military facilities, including just of public highways leading in or out. That gives the Chinese government intelligence they wouldn’t otherwise have.
And it could also ask for photos near locations where Chinese dissidents or their family members live.
Use your imagination, what happens if DJI decides to add a little logic test to their firmware:
1) drone is flying in Ukraine?
2) motor amperage is higher than normal (probably carrying a grenade)?
If 1 and 2, return to takeoff point and drop the grenade
Maybe mix in a rand() so Ukraine doesn't catch on too quick. Could easily carve out the serial numbers of ones you've sold to friendly countries to not trigger the logic as well.
What concerns most people is firmware and software, the inevitable phone apps etc.
Not that I could trust an US or EU product to be less invasive of users privacy; if we don't want products that phone home we must make them by ourselves.
Not an easy task, however, especially wrt undocumented chipsets running tight closed firmware.
As the discussion already shows there's 2 ways to interpret what you mean with geopolitical aspect. Assuming it's the privacy one, could someone elaborate on how feasible it is to use a drone in isolation?
For example, I have Huawei headphones, but did not download their app. Even with bad intent, there should be no way they can 'phone home' over regular BLE, through my device's default audio drivers.
Same for a password app that doesn't have internet access allowed or a WiFi device that's on a closed network (only works if they don't need cloud to function of course).
Perhaps this kind of isolation is not possible for a DJI, maybe because they have 3G or (need) WiFi on board or in the app that's connected to the world? The further away this need is from the core usage, the easier it may be to 'block' or replace it with something 'Western'.
Building a drone is incredibly easy these days, there's so much reference information out there now and pretty much all the pieces just plug together.
There's tons of great open source flight controller software out there - ardupilot, inav, betaflight, etc. I'm wondering what you didn't find particularly appealing about them?
Isn't the concern with DJI mostly the software (artificial flight limitations, phone-home ability, ability for China to lock you out on a whim). I'm not concerned that the motors and carbon tubes on my drones are made in China, I'm worried about truly owning the device I'm flying.
If I were a Ukrainian DJI pilot I'd be worried about China doing Russia a favor by releasing a firmware update with this logic:
1) drone is flying in Ukraine?
2) motor amperage is higher than normal (probably carrying a grenade)?
If 1 and 2, just return to takeoff point and drop the grenade
Maybe mix in a rand() so Ukraine doesn't catch on too quick.
Valid! It is interesting to me how the hobby market is all Chinese. I'm not sure why - perhaps it's a race to the bottom on price, and non-Chinese hardware manufacturers can't complete on price, but that's speculation.
It's a good question, what are the geopolitical aspects of a Chinese company running cloud software and shipping firmware to a bunch of flying cameras?
Does that mean they can run the metadata through machine learning and save all the video their filter decides is interesting?
That sounds like it has geopolitical aspects whether they're doing it right now or not.
Also, one aspect is financially supporting an entity which is based in a country that doesn't have a good notion of separation between corporation and state. You are very much purchasing a drone from the Chinese state. Corporations are required to have a certain percentage of party members.
Instead, putting that same money into a corporation from a place where privacy is valued and there isn't a direct benefit to the state is best in my opinion. All of these little micro-choices add up in the long run.
I think, if you value personal freedom and rule of law instead of rule by law, you need to stop funneling money into the Chinese economy.
Surely a company in Taiwan could be competitive in this space?
Modified DJI drones are being used by Ukraine against Russia. Conceivably if the Chinese government wanted they could force the company to issue an update to disable this use case.
It's definitely some scary stuff. Loitering munitions like the hero-120 seem like they might wind up seeing widespread use, as they provide reconnaissance and range much greater than what is otherwise available for infantry, and can be scaled up and added on to vehicles like the unmanned LRUSV boat[1] in order to cover a wide range in the indo-pacific.
Perhaps a little pedantic but as a thought experiment, if ABC corp was awesome at drones and wanted to solely manufacture in China, but in order to do so was forced to form ABC_China_LLC and transfer al the IP and know-how, how would you feel about it then?
It's like a reverse "what if China invades Taiwan and takes TSMC".
So if you were one of these people and some jamoke was flying one of these drones around your area I'd imagine that would have a profoundly negative effect on your psyche. Which is one of the reasons I'd never fly a DJI drone. I'd expect there's a potential that the drone is feeding back track and positioning data w\ imagery to a "service".
That's a bit extreme example for high value targets, a hasty generalization fallacy. Imagine a regular US Joe - how is that going to affect them? Now imagine when a US corp will irreversibly shut down your account based on what you wrote on your Android phone on Reddit because some dodgy ML flagged you - which one has a higher probability to happen? A Chinese hit squad or automated ban from a "friendly" US corp?
What's really amazing is that they used a $2,000 drone, not something super super high end and specialized and out of reach. Plenty of hobby photographers have camera bodies, or combinations of camera body and lens, that cost that much.
I have waded into the drone space recently. I had my eye on them (specifically DJI; they're clearly the leader) for a while (hobby photographer; lover of tech toys), but every time I looked in the past they were too expensive for me to justify. My uncle had one that as $1200 or so, and then a friend had one at like $600, and then just before we were going on vacation to Scotland I looked again and -- HOLY CRAP -- there's a model at $299.
Sold.
It's the DJI Mini SE, and you DO give up some stuff vs. the next level (about $500), but most of it is the drop from 4K video to "merely" HD. (There's also reduced range, which might end up mattering more.) OTOH $299 is for me a point where, if I fuck it up, I can be sanguine about it.
It's INSANELY easy and fun to use. I got comfortable enough to send it far out over lochs, and to learn to trust its "return to home" function when flying in places where line of sight might obstruct the signal. If you haven't played with one you probably wonder how it handles losing a solid connection with the operator, and the answer is that, at least at this level, it remembers where it launched from, heads to a previously-set height (to avoid obstacles) and then comes home. At some point en route it'll re-acquire a connection and you can take back over.
(Higher-end models (like the one they took to Everest) are able to navigate around obstacles and fly a more complex path home, but hey, this is the $299 model.)
I'm happy to share the video I shot but not publicly here. PM me (is that a thing?) if you want a link. And if you plan to travel somewhere beautiful where drone flight isn't severely restricted, I strongly suggest you consider getting one, China or not.
The smaller drone is awesome for me, small form factor, low enough price and good enough camera. I use a mini 2 and my best use case has been flying and having it follow me while I'm paddleboarding, great footage that I'd never thought I'd get before I got the drone.
I have a Mavic Mini. With a small drone, and a windy environment "return to home" can be scary given that the drone flies to max altitude first before returning home. It makes sense, but a little terrifying.
I agree with this sentiment. The first time it happened the drone was fighting its way back home against a strong head wind. It was nerve racking to watch the battery level dropping almost to zero…. Just before the drone landed.
you can do this with a custom built drone too for under $400 for just the drone. large props, high kv motors and your good to go. Mr Steele was flying at one of the everest base camps not long ago
Same here. Very annoying editing. Mountain footage is best when it's sweeping, languid and relaxed. Just as I was identifying a location it would cut. Hope there's raw footage out of this.
I think this is the effect of Tik Tok and Instagram Reels. Our already short attention spans have become even shorter to where if something doesn't get to the point in .2 seconds, people might lose interest.
(Obvious exaggeration, but there is a trend to hyper-compression of content)
Happy to read I wasn't the only one. Each time I started to bask in wonder of a shot (because I do find them amazing), ready to 'fly' along with the drone (that's what they do right), I got brutally snapped out and into another shot, rinse and repeat until at the end I was just bracing for each shot's premature end.
> A DJI Mavic drone was used a few years ago to aid in a rescue operation on K2
Are drone rescue-assist stories collected somewhere? I dreamed about this kind of thing all the time as a kid and now that it's actually happening I want the details!
Consumer drones have reached the point of insane use cases that I dont think a lot ever believed possible.
They are being used in the Ukraine/Russia conflict atm by each side for spotting and dropping grenades and mortar shells. They are doing it by rigging them up with cheap aftermarket parts and then rigging the AUX light on/off to trigger the drop.
They are also being used in other conflicts in Syria, Yemen, and Myanmar.
They quite literally have changed warfare because they are so affordable.
Really interesting overall. Will be interesting to see this all morphs into.
Be prepared for your interest to taper. I expect the anti- or counter- drone technology is a little more expensive, but it exists, a lot, so drone warfare has technically been stalemated already. I think this is a good thing, leaving most of the interesting bits in earnest ethical discussion.
A microwave hacked to work with the doors open will disable most of the commercially available drones. 800W of transmission at 2.4 GHz is tough to speak through.
Of course, this way is quite dangerous, and violates radio frequency regulations, but if it's a war, who cares.
I would assume that unless you are able to deliver enough power to damage the receiver (and remember it goes down fast, r^2, plus transmitter is on the side of the microwave, standing wave perpendicular to the door), it wouldn't really impact transmission. It's not AM radio and you are not even outputting noise with timing comparable to transmission, just adding constant (or maybe 50hz sine).
Plus there are multiple channels at 2.4Ghz, and you are probably outputting a narrow single freq.
But that's just me guessing, I'd love to know if it would actually work.
It slightly changes frequency randomly on every zero crossing of the input frequency, so 100Hz FSK modulation effectively. It is enough to slow down your bluetooth and wifi when the door is closed and the radiated power is fully legal (<0.1W IIRC), so the effect should be amplified a lot when the door is open. Long distance flight is already getting close to the limits of what signal integrity you can get, so even a few miliwatts at the drone might be enough to disable the communications with it.
I too would really like to know, and try it too, but getting permission for 800W transmission would be a pain.
In the us the regulations say "minimum power required" but no more than 1W eirp, which means the radio can be less than a watt with a directional antenna.
Good 802.11 radios can do 1000mW.
A microwave oven magnetron and a simple aluminum waveguide is many hundreds or thousands of times more effective radiated power.
Can't you go around that if you have direct line of sight to the drone, with some laser or very targeted radio? Or perhaps a relay drone. Also I assume the drones will increasingly become autonomous.
Lazer? Sure, if you can aim it that well. Highly targeted radio? A bit doubtful, at least not without increased transmission power.
For what it's worth, this attack can be sidestepped fairly easily just by not using open frequencies, to which microwave ovens are usually tuned(for regulatory reasons). This is only useful against drones that are available to buy for individuals, as they are forced to use the same open frequencies. Anything military grade is likely using other frequencies, and you can't use cheap microwave ovens to generate ridiculous amounts of them.
Proximity fuzes are a thing, and you've got a target that doesn't have the torque to deal with random strands of carbon fiber thrown into it propellers, it should be a fairly simple matter to make a shell that is almost nerf safe, but deadly to drones.
The issue is collateral damage. Using a flak gun to take out a drone flying 20 ft over a crowds head at 120mph is going to probably do far more damage than the drone would.
It was in the context of war zone but it's not a massive stretch of the imagination that sooner or later some terrorist movement will start using them. In fact I am surprised they haven't already.
My armchair theory is that anyone smart enough to inflict horrifying damage on society is able to find a comfortable niche for themselves within it, with a very few rare exceptions. Maybe the FBI and other agencies are more effective than we give them credit for, too, and can crack down quickly on groups with a central mastermind and expendable minions carrying out attacks
I came to a similar conclusion while standing in security queues at airports. There are heaps of easy ways to do dastardly airliner-related things but the people with the capacity are too nice to actually do anything like that and are all too busy anyway.
Assassinating public officials with drones has become a fashion. Just not in the US (yet). If you don’t think it’s on the US Secret Service’s radar though, you’re not paying attention.
A common tactic in Syria for years is literally putting a couple lbs of explosives on a consumer drone and kamikaze’ng it into a target.
Where would the most predictable time be for going after an official? At a large event they are supposed to be at.
Well, if proximity detonation is an issue, there's always weapons like CIWS [1] and C-RAM [2]. I imagine there could easily be some kind of adaption made for specialized ammo. Instead of typical bullets, use some kind of very low grade concussive. The explosive wouldn't necessarily need to be an explosive, but merely just something to disrupt the air around one or two blades of the drone to force it into an unrecoverable spin.
Similar to small grade concussives, I've heard some interesting defense systems use a projectile that has a kind of "mini parachute" to overwhelm target acquisition systems. I can't recall what it was in relation to. Chaff, maybe? The point is, if you could get enough small objects floating in the area, you could make it much harder for an enemy drone to maneuver within a specific area.
Honestly, I think the soon-to-be hurdle would be around implementing a good jamming system against automated defenses, which would probably lead to inventing some sort of miniaturized version of current fighter planes, but built in such a way that doesn't need to account for things like G tolerance for pilots.
None of those is going to be a good idea using in a stadium, above a crowd, with buildings in the background (less than 100 yards away), etc. which are the big threat areas.
Drones that can carry a couple pounds or more of C4 (which is a lot) can fly literally 10 ft above roof tops and crowds at 100+ mph while zig zagging through buildings and alleyways - fully autonomously.
This isn’t theory, there are live demonstrations on YouTube.
Zigzagging through a forest fully autonomously (with no GPS) - there are videos on YouTube of a Swiss company doing similar. [https://youtu.be/m89bNn6RFoQ]
Folks have been using those and similar (cheaper) drones to drop Grenades on tanks in Ukraine.
As the autonomous flight is harder with smaller drones (less computing payload available, worse sensors), the only reason you’re not seeing both of these parts together in urban environment is the implication (for national security). It is there.
Here's the video of that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr7L2t-svJQ&t=16s - that's below 5mph and carrying an external payload of 0 grams, and the reason it's in a forest is because you can't fit them all in an alleyway and you need multiple in order for them to work.
>> Here is a YouTube video of a demonstration with a hexcopter
At 22mph, the claim was 100mph+
>> And here is a dude flying a DJI Inspire
At around 20 mph max but mostly hovering and for 8 minutes at that before running out of juice
>> Folks have been using those
No. People like yourself can easily dream this concept. It stands to reason, why wouldn't it be possible? The truth is that battery technology is no where near good enough yet.
It's the first idea tried in Syria, it's been tried thousands of times at this point and yet we have more documented cases of the aggressors killing or injuring themselves than of the 3 documented cases where this actually worked in practice - all 3 of which i think everyone can agree from the footage are pure fluke. Zero aiming was possible, it was just release and hope for the best in all 3 cases.
What people are actually using them for is for recon and aiming of artillery. They're effective in these roles and that's why they're used for this rather than strapping heavy explosives to them.
>> autonomous flight is harder with smaller drones (less computing payload available
That's not true. Compute isn't a restriction in small drone autonomy. A basic F4 is wayyyyy overkill for flight stability and control. Waypoint navigation is even lower power requirements since it amounts to a simple loop not much more complex than:
1. Get current GPS coordinates
2. Get current compass heading
3. Send directional input via serial peripheral to F3 or F4 flight controller
4. Repeat
The flight controller is doing far more processing than this - gyro input & smoothing for each of 3 axes, accelerometer (same), GPS location at approx 10Hz, optionally barometric input (rare and usually not necessary). These inputs are often processed through kalmann filter before finally calculating the torque command to issue to each ESC's microcontroller. This only happens at up to a few hundred Hz so you can see compute power is not a restriction.
In larger aircraft it's harder because you can't beat physics, in a small drone i can change the amount of torque applied to a propeller 4+ times per rotation in toy off the shelf drone tech today. With larger craft that have non-electric motors this is simply not possible. You can't instruct a mechanical engine to regulate its power output with the same fidelity of an electric motor.
>> worse sensors
The only required input sensor is a gyro - in practice we use accelerometers and GPS in autonomous drones but there are ways of avoiding the need for these (e.g. visual inputs / optical flow as a correction for drift). MEMS gyros are cheap and effective, what better sensors do you need?
Your reasoning is uninformed / dreamed up based on watching too many movies and not being familiar with the actual discipline.
Better algorithms are a restriction. The science / theory part of implementation was achieved by all projects fairly quickly (ardupilot, clean/betaflight, etc. etc.) - but the art part, the how it feels and performs in practice, is an unsolved problem under continual development.
>> drop Grenades
Too heavy given current battery technology and lack of aiming. These are not effective weapons which is why they have limited success. More people have been killed in war zones in the past decade by garden spades than toy / photo drones with explosives.
TL;DR until batteries technology moves forward by a few generations, the concept of a small drone as an offensive weapon will not be better than that offered by something like the switchblade drone. Which when you cut through the excitment, is less valuable than conventional weaponry in most fight scenarios.
Compute is not a limiting factor in a small drone for basic flight operations, it is a limiting factor for real-time optical guidance (aka in GPS denied areas and real-time object/target recognition). Which is exactly what I was referring to.
Those examples yes are not showing 100mph. I’m afraid the video I’m referring to has been pulled, and the in-person demonstrations I’ve been asked to not talk about or publicize (now that I follow up with the parties involved).
The battery technology is more
than sufficient for what I’m describing. My M300RTK has no issues carrying 5+ lbs for 15 minutes or 1-2 lbs for 40 minutes, which is more than sufficient, and scale is more than adequate here.
You’re a couple years behind on this assessment. I literally have a 10 lb ‘hunter killer’ autonomous anti-drone drone from a company I’m not going to name sitting a few desks away from me right now.
>> I’m afraid the video I’m referring to has been pulled, and the in-person demonstrations I’ve been asked to not talk about or publicize
Interesting.
Let's take a second to take this from back of a fag packet physics.
To produce a 100mph drone is easy - lets take one of mine (there's nothing special about it) as a starting point and then lets see what we can change to achieve load carrying while retaining this speed.
Each motor & prop combo produces 1.5kg of thrust. They do this while drawing 40amps each from a 6s - which they can sustain for up to around 10 seconds before burning out MOSFETs on the ESCs (not to mention deforming the battery plug due to 160amps passing through a 60amp connector). This craft has a weight of just under 350 grams and when coupled with an 1800mah 6s, has an all up weight just under 650 grams.
We want to carry "several pounds" - lets make it easy, lets say 2lbs - and retain that 100mph speed.
Adding 10 grams prevents us hitting 100mph, we need to scale up our thrust. First problem - there's no other prop pitch or blade count for this motor size which will increase thrust while retaining prop speed, so we need to move up a size in motor. Since we need to carry 2lbs, you might think we only need each motor / prop combo to produce at an extra 0.5lbs but in practice we're going to need more than this because we need to sustain the aircraft vertically, whilst also providing enough thrust horizontally to reach the target speed, so in practice we will need more than an extra 8lbs of thrust (remember how 6kgs of thrust is needed to carry a 650g craft to 100mph - you don't just get to add 2lbs of thrust and call it done).
Problem - we need a motor / prop combo that produces above 2.5kg thrust each - so we're into 14 inch propellers and we need a motor heavy enough to take around 60amps at 6s (i'm being conservative to try and make the maths work out in your favour but i hope we can both agree that only 60amps is pure fantasy here).
That's a new problem, our weight went up and so we need even more thrust to compensate.
That's another new problem, we have more thrust but now we need a power supply capable of a higher discharge rate - that kind of battery entails even more weight.
But now there's a new problem, our larger props mean we're well away from the happy 300-400mph tip speed and now we're approaching the speed of sound - which of course means we can't fly.
But now there's a new problem, the battery that can supply that discharge does exist, the only problem is it weighs almost 2kg by itself.
And so we're back to you can't fly 2lbs payload at 100mph on today's battery tech.
Camera operators have been trying hard for years at this point to put a RED or some other expensive heavy camera / lens combo right next to race cars on track. There are two solutions for that today: 1 - fly the heavy lens and get that sweet image but do it at 20mph or 2 - keep up with the 100mph+ action but film it on a gopro or similar.
You're totally right, I have no idea what I'm talking about!
Some random babble:
I'm glad you're running 6S at least. I was worried you were running something like a 2S rig.
Is your your assertion is no one can build a quadcopter style drone that can go 100mph and carrying a 2lb payload?
Or that you can't add 2lbs to your 6 inch racing style quad and go 100mph without changing something design wise?
Because the first has a number of commercial products (albeit using hybrid powertrains due to longer desired range [https://soninhybrid.com/], [https://dronedj.com/2022/01/04/firefly-really-heavy-lift-dro...]). They'd have no issues doing the same thing over shorter distance, but folks wouldn't buy them - because for the commercial use cases, speed is only useful when it means covering more distance (and is therefore is really speed + distance). Tweaking some variables and changing some thinking would get you something from DJI that would have no issues, but it wouldn't sell, at least to the typical commercial or recreational market.
I would be VERY surprised if DJI didn't already have a healthy set of military contracts for doing exactly this, but if so, it isn't anything public.
The second yeah, should hopefully be obvious. It isn't THAT far off though, as you'll see below.
For the situation I'm mentioning, there are different tradeoffs, and I'm doing the best I can without causing problems re: confidential details:
You're getting confused on amperage, because peak amperage output is a matter of parallelizing batteries and design of the cell, and is NOT battery chemistry limitations (per-se). You can double your peak available amperage by changing the way your battery is wired. It doesn't add weight. It does halve capacity however, but that is range, not peak power.
Thermal management is one of the bigger issues in practice, and higher voltages tend to help a lot there (less resistance in wiring for a given amount of power delivered). It also results in less weight.
If you had a 40 amp peak 6S pack (which is only ~ 800 watts peak), you'd get the same per-pack equivalent draw with 3x in parallel (120amp total is 40 amp per pack) or 2.6kw. But frankly, 12S (or higher voltage) is better in every way but expense/parts availability if you're handy with electronics. A 12S 40A pack delivers 3x the actual power for the same wiring, assuming components are insulated/rated for the voltage.
And yeah, I know 'peak amps' numbers on most batteries are a lie, first thing I do when I do a build is instrument power flow, including amperage under load.
ESCs/motor controllers would likely be your primary sourcing difficulty, but you can get COTS 120 Amp individual motor ESCs [https://www.getfpv.com/electronics/electronic-speed-controll...] inexpensively if you're running 6S, and not too crazy expensive if you're running 12S like that particular one is designed for. That one also already has BLHeli_32, but most of them can be re-flashed, and then every COTS flight controller can deal with them pretty easily. That particular ESC is rated for controlling 32kw PER MOTOR, by the way. You could use a 4 in 1, but as you note, meh on total power rating. They are compact. They also have thermal management issues. Individual ESCs can get out into the airstream easier, and if you fry one it's less work to replace.
Motors with the desired design criteria would be next, sourcing difficulty wise, but that would depend on specific propeller/fan design. There are a LOT of options, and winding your own actually isn't THAT hard (or re-winding a COTS one for different characteristics).
Most likely anyone who is doing what I describe at a state actor level is going to be doing their own ESC design, and ESC + flight control firmware anyway, and the electronics to make a compact ESC for arbitrary amperage/voltages are very well understood. They're used in everything from elevator motors, to milling machines, to handtools. If it's someone doing a military style contract, they'll of course do their own battery packs, nominally to maximize their performance envelope for whatever mission they're trying to get the gov't to cough up cash for, but also because COTS will make them look less awesome.
But it's easy to rewire COTS packs to do pretty much whatever you want tradeoff wise, re: voltage, amperage, etc. Lithium batteries are amazing for their ability to handle very high peak power draw, and in the scenario that I'm describing, the bottleneck would likely be thermals, not chemistry or weight, and considering the time window being discussed, there are lightweight and interesting ways of handling that.
100 mph == 1.6 miles per minute after all, and it's highly unlikely the drone would be anything but hot gas and rapidly disassembled small parts after that amount of time.
You're getting confused on props and tip speed, because you aren't thinking of, or aren't aware of, ducted fans which specifically solve this problem by giving you much higher thrust at the cost of a little (or a lot, depending on the frame design) extra weight. A little less than double, depending on conditions.
Prop pitch and design would look weird, comparatively, depending on the mission, from what you're used to seeing, and depending on the specific numbers, elements like blade count, leading and trailing edge, chord length, etc. tend to differ.
High agility has different airflow and stall characteristics than maximum speed and/or maximum weight and propellers designed for one tend to be not great for the other.
That said, there are a number of aerospace engineers quite familiar with the problem, and it's well solved at this point, up to ~ 160ish mph. And by well solved, I mean Embry-Riddle has it in their basic curricula, and there are a LOT of graduates rattling around. They're pretty smart too, in my experience, and are itching for problems like this to solve. Especially if you are ok with things exploding until they get it right.
After that it requires more complex solutions (usually involving a degree of direct jet propulsion) and some amount of fire.
Alright, I'm done. Anything more and I'm going to get in trouble.
Flak shells are designed to explode into a hail of steel fragments, in order to damage the target. Naturally a rain of steel from the sky is not good if you are standing below.
Allegedly at Pearl Harbour 63 American civilians were killed by anti-aircraft shells falling on them and 34 wounded.
Yup, and the smallest typical flak shell is going to necessarily have a pretty large lethal radius as that is what would get the drone.
It takes a lot less than that to blind everyone in the crowd with shrapnel or kill them, if you’re trying to shoot down the drone flying 20 ft over their heads.
The smaller the kill radius, the more difficult the intercept (fundamentally) - and that’s assuming there is a safe backdrop for any non-exploded shells.
These scenarios are much different than point defense at sea of a warship, or defense of the skies over a military base or city surrounded by mostly empty desert.
Their point I think is that drones can operate outside of the safe operation envelope of a flak canon. I don't think flak canons would be a good anti-drone defense except in really specific scenarios, and drone operators would then just not fly those scenarios.
The problem is that the counter drone technology, if it is a drone itself, will necessarily always be more expensive than the attack drone (because it must follow the attack drone). In that case it becomes a lopsided war of attrition.
I don't know anything about anything, so take with a large grain of salt.
drones work because of their elegant control mechanisms. Those require a nice clean radio environment. I suspect, but I do not know, a big spark would mess with the video stream coming from the drone, and probably the real time controls going to the drone. So, like, an arc welder or Tesla coil sparking continuously would do unpleasant things to the drone - no remote control.
You could, of course, make the drone smarter, use AI to detect targets. but that would hurt performance, and make the drone more expensive. I'd point to Iran faking gps signals to ground the us drone, like a while ago.
It's a bunch of tradeoffs. Preprogrammed doesn't have versatility, but is cheap. Dynamic is versatile, but expensive. Remote control is vulnerable to other stuff.
Sparks are easy to filter out. There are complex jamming and anti-jamming measures. Civilian drones aren't designed for this so they are easy to shut down, military drones are getting better at this quickly. Before the war in Ukraine people said russian electronic warfare systems and air defence will make drones useless. There were different phases in this war, at first Russians weren't even doing air defense so Bayraktars were destroying airdefense systems (which is crazy :) ). Now that Russians fixed that issue - Bayraktars aren't doing much damage from what we can see, but the artillery guidance drones are still doing OK. I've heard good things about WB Electronics Fly Eye drones for example. They have some capacity to survive in area where the radio communication is jammed.
Also - if you do jamming - it makes you a big target broadcasting "I'm HERE!". There are missiles that are designed to guide themselves towards jamming/radar stations like HARM.
So with combined arms you can:
- launch a decoy
- watch for radar/air defence/jamming stations
- launch HARM missiles to destroy them
- launch drones to guide artillery
- destroy undefended bases with cheap and accurate drone-adjusted artillery fire
Also - military drones are usually controlled differently from the civilians ones. It feels more like playing RTS (click on the target, wait for the drone to get there) instead of a flying simulator (control the engines constantly). So if you're jammed for 5 minutes while going from point A to point B - it doesn't matter.
Also military drones often use satellite communication which is much harder to disrupt than direct radio connection.
They don’t require a clean radio environment, and can (and have shown in field trials) excellent full autonomous modes. Still a generation or two out for typical consumer drones though.
I guess I don't understand what precision is needed when dropping a grenade. I've never had a grenade thrown at me. I sort of suspect, but have no first hand knowledge, that a half a second is a big deal. yes, the drone will go to the location and drop the grenade. But there's no opportunity for dynamic reaction for changing conditions. I think, but do not know, that a few feet are a big deal with small explosives. Well, I kinda know from bottle rockets and such, but they aren't that scary.
You can cover a lot of small errors with a bigger explosion. but that means more payload, and more expensive.
denying that elegant control of small explosive in a precise location seems like a winner. yeah, you can go to position X but maybe I'm a little to the left of that. of course it's not free, but me picking up my shit and moving 10 feet is pretty cheap. cheaper than a drone for sure.
Maybe it doesn't matter, maybe tensor flow says that's a person near the target, adjust location to drop the explosive on the person.
from the point of a know nothing observer, it sure seems like there is some wiggle room. I'm not convinced an inexpensive drone has the capacity to solve these problems. (but you could send like 36 and drop grenades in a 6x6 grid, but that seems expensive).
you're underestimating the control software. with consumer grade cameras and simple image processing, you can write "go to x, find the nearest person and drop on them". also, just having the camera in the air is enough to make it much easier to launch a rocket at a target for juicier targets.
Not just field trials, your average joe has been able to program waypoint missions for a long time. They generally require reliable GPS after take off, but I imagine rough intertial referential sensors would be enough for warfare. It's enough for commercial aviation.
Consumer grade IMUs drift into unacceptable garbage in about two minutes of flight without GPS corrections[0]. You would need visual odometry to work in GNSS-denied environments
>The problem is that the counter drone technology, if it is a drone itself, will necessarily always be more expensive than the attack drone (because it must follow the attack drone).
Same argument made against Israel's Iron Dome against Hamas's more or less crude rockets.
Said argument misses the point. The question isn't whether an Iron Dome missile is more expensive than a Hamas rocket (it is). It's whether an Iron Dome missile is more valuable than the lives and property lost by letting that Hamas rocket through.
Yes, but this works because Israel has access to vastly more money than Hamas does. So they can withstand a 10^X cost discrepancy. It would not work between two parties who are close to evenly matched financially.
Not necessarily. The hunter drone don't need to carry payload that the attack drone is supposedly carrying. Also it may not need the batteries for long range. It is kind of like bomber-fighter situation.
I think the hunter drones would be first to get autonomous operations. The cost of errors/bugs is less for them than say for a ground attack drone hitting your own tank or unrelated civilian truck.
One option is radio antennas in a gun shaped thing. And it just scales up from there. You can use very powerful antennas on the ground or in a plane to interfere with the control system or GPS.
Also known as a perfect beacon for an anti-radiation missile.
It's not quite "drones HATE this one weird trick". Yes, jamming is a thing, but so are FHSS, ARMs and any number of other countermeasure-counters. No GPS/GNSS/whatever? Inertial navigation systems. No comms at all? All kinds of flavors of automation.
Simple countermeasures may be effective against consumer drones, but the overall problem is an iterative metagame where flawless countermeasures are pretty rare and there's usually a way to adapt or fight back.
I meant that if you intend to use a jammer as a countermeasure against a drone, you're making yourself vulnerable to ARMs. Sure, you can position the jammer away from anything important but that ups your time to redeploy / reconfigure it, reducing its effectiveness. You also lose the jammer, though that might not necessarily be a problem if it's a lot cheaper than an ARM and you have a lot of them available.
But of course ARMs work fine against a drone's controller, too - assuming it isn't using FHSS, though that itself assumes no crazy-advanced anti-FHSS RDF. That's kind of my point regarding how this stuff cuts both ways, how even if a countermeasure works in one instance that's no guarantee it'll continue working, and how countermeasures themselves generally have weaknesses.
Naval engineering provides a lot of examples of this dynamic. Check out what the introduction and development of the torpedo did to the meta.
> They are doing it by rigging them up with cheap aftermarket parts and then rigging the AUX light on/off to trigger the drop.
I feel like this implies that they're using DJI/consumer drones. They aren't, those are too expensive and too slow. They use custom-built FPV drones, which are much faster, cheaper, and much easier to build from parts.
The phrase "rigging them up with aftermarket parts" doesn't really apply when the entire drone is "cheap aftermarket parts".
DJI drones while expensive they are rather user friendly. Some fighters in Ukraine do use them with aftermarket droppers[1]. Payload is limited to a single VOG-17M grenade. Dropper has a light sensor and is triggered by aux light.
They also build custom drones as well. For example there's R18 by Aerorozvidka[2]. Which is largeish octacopter from higher quality hobby parts. Payload is ~5kg which allows taking multiple anti-armor grenades or small mortar rounds.
Yup and if they are custom FPV builds then you get quite a lot of IO ports at your disposal. Plus the flight controller supports easy mapping to your transmitter so you just have to flick a switch.
“War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
The rescue team I was on (https://www.northshorerescue.com/) regularly uses drones to assist with rescues. They're incredibly handy when needing to navigate/peek-around hazardous terrain while avoiding the necessary rope rigging.
> A surfer was pulled out to sea by a rip current and was stranded in the water. The sheriffs department used their drone to find him, and used the drones loudspeaker to tell him to swim farther out where a boat could reach him.
I don't have any specific stories, but my local rescue team in Cape Town now uses a drone on many mountain rescue callouts to assist in locating the patients.
It is surprisingly difficult to use a drone effectively for that - it is much harder to spot someone from a drone's camera than you'd expect. It is often still faster to find the patients by foot, but it has helped in some cases. And when the patients have been found, the drone can help to scout the surrounding area to find the best route out.
So overall the drone has been some help, but it hasn't significantly affected the outcome of rescue operations in any case that I know of.
Swiss air rescue (REGA) is using drones[1] to a limited degree but they are not what you think. They are not quad copters instead they look more like real helicopters. The primary reason being air time.
From personal experience working with the Swedish Rescue Drone initiative, sensitive data captured during SAR might fall under GDPR. Some groups coordinating SAR operations request complete control over image data captured during flights, and in some cases for good reason. For instance, if the search is for an animal, providing the caretakers of that animal with imagery data may make them rush out on location to capture the animal. For a dog, for instance, that has been missing for a few days their behaviour is very much polarized towards the flight response. It may be that the person missing may not want to be found. It may be that the person notifying authorities may want to find the missing person for reasons they dont communicate. There are all kinds of reasons for why data from SAR operations should not be made public.
That being said, drone use in the field is extremely useful in many SAR situations, and is often managed by volunteers that go out with machines of varying quality. Some show up with a DJI-platform equipped with thermal and optical cameras, others with sub 250g fpv drones. In some environments, simply having the altitude offers an effective enough leverage to use drones in the cheaper end of the spectrum. Flight time matters a lot.
With respect to sensor types, having access to thermal information is invaluable in some cases, and in others completely useless. It ofc depends on the thermal difference between the object you are searching for and its surroundings. In all cases, it is very expensive relative to optical information.
Anyone with decent electronics knowledge can put together a drone kit for around 150 bucks. Building a thermal camera without shelling out a decent sum of cash, on the other hand..
I still wonder at the fact that reaching or flying a drone on a place on earth is still an "almost impossible" feat when humans are going out to space or even other planets to explore. I understand the science, I still can't comprehend the fact. These small things are reminder that there is lot of exploration left for human kind.
Imagine the points in the wilderness we haven't truly explored due to lack of safe passage. Valleys or caves or even just particularly dense forest. I am not sure we would discover much new, but I do enjoy the fact that we haven't been everywhere. The internet can make it feel like all possible exploration has been done, reduced to datapoints and photos.
We can barely dig deep enough in earth before our equipment either melt or explode due to high pressure. Yeah there is a lot of exploring left right here on earth. I think the current record is 12km and earth diameter is 12,000km.
1. Was this sponsored by DJI, which they could potentially use for any of their promotional / advertising efforts?
2. Is there a raw version? I would think that there should be more shakiness or variability in the captured footage, given the high altitude and assumption that the air flow would easily disrupt the flight of the drone.
3. What period of the year was this taken? Usually you'd hear that Mt. Everest is always packed with mountaineers, and being able to get a shot with very few people on the mountain slopes is quite uncommon.
Side note: This is a spectacular feat - man and machine.
Regarding question 3, this would have been shot during the Spring climbing season. This year had an unusually long period of calm weather, which allowed the ~250 climbers and ~600 Sherpas to summit over the course of 12 days.
The vast majority of climbers ascend from the southeast route (from Nepal), with a smaller number ascending from the northeast (Tibetan) route. I can't tell for sure which direction the drone is flying in, but some clever piloting may have helped here.
Doesn't everyone climb at the same time of day, plus or minus an hour or two? So in the morning everyone is on one part of the mountain, in the afternoon they are somewhere else and the first place is clear of people.
Regarding (2.) The gimbals on DJI drones are actually crazy good! As is the flight stabilisation and on-drone EIS. They make sub-millimetre and sub-arcsecondary orientation corrections every couple of milliseconds.
When you put these all together you find that you rarely have to stabilise footage in post.
> I would think that there should be more shakiness or variability in the captured footage, given the high altitude and assumption that the air flow would easily disrupt the flight of the drone.
Older drones like the GoPro Karma I'm flying definitely have issues there, but modern drones and gimbals are extremely smooth.
The camera is mounted on one of the best gimbals available. The DJI drones also do an amazing job at being stable during windy conditions. And sure, there could be some additional video editing later, but probably marginal.
It seems like someone brought up the drone and then flew it around near the summit. Knowing very little about the current state of drones, would it be feasible for one to take off from a high-altitude camp instead and truly “fly over” Everest?
Top-end parts can produce over a 10:1 thrust to weight ratio on performance drones at sea level. I would expect that's still enough to at least hover at the summit of Everest, and if not with the exact same specs, then with larger-than-sea-level-optimal propeller.
This was almost 4 years ago, I bet that today someone could fly even higher.
> The flight took place on January 3, 2019, near the Strezhevoy city, Tomsk Region, RUSSIA. (Western Siberia). My goal was to overcome the record height for rotary-winged machines (According to Wikipedia: June 21, 1972, the French pilot Jean Bulet raised the Aérospatiale SA.315B Lama helicopter to a height of 12,442 meters), which was completely possible. My drone reached a height of 12,467 meters from ground level as measured by GPS and 12,925 meters from ground level as measured by a barometer, which is standard for aviation.
It's a shame you can't even look at some spectacular drone footage without having to wade through a swamp of baseless accusations and petty hate, just because the camera drone is made by a Chinese company.
You can look at that footage without even tiptoeing the swamp. To read the comments might be a different story, although by the time I got here it was quite ease to stay on dry land, which may have been different for you.
Then again, it's not about China, it's about a country with a regime that gives zero transparency and seemingly gives little about privacy regulation, and which has brought forth at least one big electronics company that's being blocked from big parts of western markets for fear of information (in)security.
Now, all that might be up for debate by itself, but you can hardly blame people extrapolate from that.
I share this sentiment. it is flat out hate against groups of people at this point. Sure, there is credible evidence of the Chinese government doing horrible things and influencing corporate decisions but hating all Chinese products is just... stupid at this point. Exact same issue with the blind hate towards ordinary Russians.
One of the top stories on hacker news RIGHT NOW is about how the life expectancy is plummeting because we’re all fat and addicted to something while being trapped in a shitty health care system.
Chinese get so goddamned butthurt and defensive it is like they are mentally ill battered wives defending their abuser.
Can you show some of these comments where Chinese people get butthurt because people shit-talk Chinese companies? Are those comments here on HN?
I've been on the Internet many years and see a lot of people getting butthurt when they read about China excelling at things, and generally the Chinese themselves are next to non-existant, at least here on the Western side of the net.
Whataboutism is prima facie, irrefutable, unquestionable evidence of butthurtism.
The phenomenon is so prevalent that the phrase 伤害中国人民的感情 causes newspaper editors and online commenters to roll their eyes because if you publish an article about how heavy rain has caused flooding in a province somewhere a dozen state-controlled media outlets and ten thousand weibo posters will drone on about 中国人民的感情.
"Whataboutism" is not the ace-in-the-sleeve you think it is. It's tucking the tail between the legs and stubbornly refuse to acknowledge defeat, because once the blatant hypocrisy has been pointed out there's nothing sensible to respond with.
But I see what level you're taking this to: anyone who disagrees with the agenda is a Chinese or Russian spy.
Not knowing much about drones, I had no idea consumer drones can fly that high! Apparently, the maximum spec height is 6 km which is impressive on its own. And this thing went 3 km higher than the spec. I had always assumed they can't rise above two or three thousand feet max.
The most impressive drone going now to me is the one NASA put on Mars since it's working at the equivalent atmospheric pressure of around 100,000 feet, though the lower gravity helps it out. Obviously it's not a consumer drone, but it used as much off-the-shelf gear as possible - I think I remember reading it just uses a few Sony 18650 lithium ion cells like you might find in your cordless drill.
Few remarks - drone (Mavic Pro 1st gen IIRC, with modified firmware) was used on neighboring Broad peak and not K2 rescue few years ago. Polish drone operator in base camp tried to help rescue efforts looking for climber lost while descending it. While they were there to film extremely amazing first skiing of K2, they tried to help when news about lost climber reached the base camp. It was great success, the guy would otherwise die considering where he was and in what state.
Then they filmed the ski descent of K2 by Andrzej Bargiel, a stunning achievement considering the exertion under no-O2 and how brutal the terrain is. Most people coming down K2 can barely walk, and plenty die on descents due to this over-exertion. They kept using the drone for quick carrying of ie medicine to higher camps, scanning the route down for skiing etc. In most places, 1 small mistake in those difficult snow conditions would be fatal,and due to weight the extremely lightweight ski equipment used required very high skiing level.
Have to say, the video footage and editing was terrible. I suppose thats what you get when you’re sponsored and the important thing is the product placement.
It's unclear who did the editing of the video, but the marketing push of the video is definitely by DJI, and the actual capture of the video (and the Everest journey) was done by 8KRAW FILMS. Original video is at their own YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnFI8lUGeks
So this is how you advertise a product - fly it over Mt Everest and give everyone the birds eye view of the tallest point on earth. Suspect DJI will shift some models of the Mavic 3...
The traffic jams are during the peak guided climbing season in May. AFAIK they've made changes to the number of permits given per year now so there should be less traffic on the mountain.
I don't see anything special here. It's a bunch of short edited clips. I could do that with my crappy homebuilt quad LOL
I want to see someone take off from base camp and land at the summit. Would love to see a more technical look at how they did this, what issues they ran into, etc. Really curious about batteries in the cold.
I feel like I need an annotated version. This is like looking at someone’s vacation photos, but you have no clue what you are looking at since you have never been there. I not even sure which mountain is Everest.
Current Formula 1 cars go the fastest in Mexico City, which is the track at the highest elevation on the current calendar at 2200m[1]. The engine lacks power due to the thinner air, but the reduced drag more than makes up for it.
So the thrust produced by the propellers on the drone should be considerably lower at the same RPM, but they might spin a fair bit faster if the engine can handle it, which would compensate. I too would be interested to know how it works out in practice.
Quite a bit. It directly affects the amount of lift the props are able to produce. I would imagine they probably used props with more aggressive pitch than the stock ones.
The latter needs to be done for all drone builds. Its quite simple: turn on manual mode, turn on blackbox recording, record hover throttle setting; enter this value in the firmware via the Mavic/CLI interface. Pretty simple. Surprised they didn't use ArduPilot or PX4 (or even iNav) all three of which are just as good as DJI, completely open source and wildly easy to configure.
> Surprised they didn't use ArduPilot or PX4 (or even iNav) all three of which are just as good as DJI, completely open source and wildly easy to configure.
Smaller sponsoring budgets. Tweaking the drone a little is not the hard part, the hard part is walking up there and funding everything required to do so.
Quite a bit. The lift produced by an airfoil is proportional to air density. You can compensate by turning the rotors faster, increasing the size of the rotors, and/or increasing the angle of attack. None of these options are free and all of them have limits.
Hard to believe DJI would let them fly vanilla drone in conditions well outside specified range knowing if it failed they would lose whatever money it took to sponsor the ascent.
I agree, I've used these drones on top of mountains > 2000M in really cold conditions, nowhere near as cold as the summit of Everest and we always say thanks to the mountain gods for her safe return. But it's always precarious with the wind and diminished battery life.
The top of mount Everest with a standard unmodified model? Skeptical.
Was it powered by Lithium batteries without extra heating? There might be cold over Everest, and Lithium batteries use to have not full capacity under such conditions.
Aren't there international rules that ban flights over Mount Everest due to it being sacred to the local populace or something like that? Do they apply to drones?
You can't tell me flying a tiny drone over the mountain top could in any way shape or form be worse than trashing the whole mountain. Not sure how 'sacred' that is
Do you think the police are gonna roll up at the top of Everest, see someone flying a drone, and confiscate it?
The worst I could possibly imagine happening is that later when the footage is released the authorities demand payment of a fine. And even if you were forced to or decided to pay the fine, that seems like it would be insignificant in light of climbing the worlds tallest mountain.
There was a general rule banning drones from Sagamartha national park, but actually you just need a permit. However if you are going over Everest, you are crossing the border from Nepal to Tibet (China), so you would have more of a challenge getting approval there.
In general though drones qualify as ‘quite annoying’, in national parks - particularly in areas like peaks or base camps where others are present.
A reminder that DJI's mobile flight control app ("DJI Fly") was removed from the Google Play store over 1.5 years ago. The company officially wants you to sideload an APK downloaded from their website. No clear explanation has been given.
“DJI drones were sanctioned under US Commerce Department and US Treasury Department regulations in 2020 and 2021. It is now illegal for any person within the United States to: Purchase any goods or services directly from SZ DJI Technology Co. Export certain data to DJI's servers in China.”
You’d think so, but Apple gets special treatment (by both the US and Chinese government).
See: Apple’s secret deal to fund Chinese technology development and how US customs ensures nobody but Apple can import even genuine Apple parts and merch.
Are you implying that Apple would openly flaunt US sanctions for the benefit of a Chinese company? I find that hard to believe.
DJI themselves have publicly blamed "the compatibility strategy between the DJI App and Google Play Store", without elaborating. There's been no mention of US sanctions from DJI or Google.
I mean, yeah, he uses a telephone too and has a bog-standard photo frame. Some things are just commodities now... consumer drones are arguably like that. Doesn't really matter that it's DJI or any other company.
Unless there are export restrictions on non-Chinese drones...? But lol, are there even any non-Chinese consumer drone manufacturers still in business or did DJI eat them all?
Hundreds of bored middle aged people summit Everest annually. There's not all that much new to learn about the experience; it's not the feat of atheticism the first attempts involved.
> And some not even by name but by social media handle.
I can find videos of people dying in car crashes, too, but that doesn't make every soccer mom in a minivan the equivalent of an F1 driver. Everything involves risk.
Yes, you can die on Everest if you're unprepared, or unlucky. The same can happen in the Adirondacks.
I'm far more interested in the stories of folks like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirmal_Purja than plain old Everest summiters, which has been conquered by folks from age 13 to 80, double amputees, and the blind. (Those folks, I'm interested in. Tech CEOs looking for a thrill? Nah.)
