Indigenous community built a DIY drone to fight off illegal loggers (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Indigenous community built a DIY drone to fight off illegal loggers (2016)

qz.com

108 pointsyurisagalov10 comments

Reminds me of the story of Krikkit.

https://sites.google.com/site/h2g2theguide/Index/k/krikkit

I missed this joke when I read it as a young lad: "the destruction of everything that wasn't Krikkit"

Mind explaining the joke? Is there another meaning besides the straight-forward one?

"It's not cricket" is an English expression meaning that something is unfair. See, for instance, http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/language/2....

Or was that the straightforward meaning you had in mind anyway?

Thanks, that's helpful. I had never heard this phrase before. I don't think it's common in the US.

Understandable since cricket itself is not very common in the US either.

It is played though, and there is a national organization: https://www.usacricket.org/.

Google Earth doesn't update often enough?

They use satellite imagery in some cases too: https://www.digital-democracy.org/ourwork/guyana/

Drones are useful because you can immediately respond to logging action, you don't have to wait until Google Earth updates which could be weeks or months. It's also significantly higher resolution than satellite imagery (whether that makes a difference).

Digital democracy do some fantastic work, and their mapping tool is open source: https://github.com/digidem/mapeo-desktop

https://www.leonardodicaprio.org/innovative-mapping-tool-for...

https://planet.com images the earth at 3-5m resolution once a day. At least in theory. I tried out some random pieces of forest in Guyana and depending on the size of your area of interest it's more like once every 3-10 days you get a portion of the area you're interested in. I don't know how fast they update but I'm pretty sure it's faster than 24 hours.

Their interface is well made and they have a free 14 day trial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_Labs

Having a proper look, this was actually in mid-2014: https://www.digital-democracy.org/blog/we-built-a-drone/

I don't think Planet Labs were scaled up at that point!

There are a few other issues: potential lack of high bandwidth internet connection makes subscriptions a problem. Price is almost certainly an issue - all the parts for this project were donated; to give an idea they're making replacement parts out of beer crates. However Digital Democracy could be an intermediary here and some of Planet Labs's goals are targeted towards humanitarian efforts.

Resolution is going to be an order of magnitude better than a satellite image, probably < 0.1m with a GoPro. Maybe that's important for producing evidence of mining or logging?

A big part of this is empowerment. They built it, they can repair it, they capture the data and they process it.

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