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Comment by socialismisok | Hacker News Reader

Nice! I use Dronelink (I'm flying an Air 2 S), and open drone map as well. But I'm mapping hundreds of acres, so I end up throwing my images into S3 and processing them on a spot instance.

I'm also working on a time series. I'll check out your projects, thanks for sharing.

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Oh, interesting! I've thought about going for larger areas, but most of the places I've been interested in looking at so far (kelp forests, wetlands) are fairly small, and it's lower anxiety to do low and slow flights where I don't have to worry about local air traffic. As a result, I've tried mostly aiming at high-resolution rather than large area. Of course, that helps with the size overhead as well--my existing computing setup is almost never the bottleneck. If you end up making any of your work public, I'd definitely be interested in taking a look--I've been starting to think about larger area surveys as well.

I usually fly at 350 feet above ground level, which results in fairly good details.

I definitely recommend getting the commercial drone pilots license if you haven't already.

Gotcha--I'll have to run the numbers on pixel sizes between the Mini 2 and Air 2S at various heights; I'm sure that the Air has a much nicer camera, but it would be interesting to see how big the difference is.

I've actually got my commercial license test scheduled for the end of the month! I'm hoping that it might help me get permission to run surveys in areas like national forests or parks that are otherwise pretty much off-limits to recreational flyers.

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