Hacker News Reader

Comment by schobi | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see some footage off that in a throw - I would expect a blurry mess.

With panono, they captured a single shot at the highest point in a throw. In daylight, short exposure time. Only when throwing straight up without strong rotation.

With (uncooled) microbolometers you can't have a short exposure times and might end up with 20-30msec effective exposure. This thing might be harder to throw up straight without rotation. Throwing through a windows or rolling? Please show me that this does not give a blurry mess, but gives useful images! Demo footage suspiciously missing...

Edit: I stand corrected - the spot video does not contain thermal but shows NIR images. One can see some point projections from a depth sensor?

View on HN

So I commented (Bounce CEO) with some explanations, and posted a sample video of the thermal that I quickly put on youtube while my team can access our official account. Posting here too: https://youtube.com/shorts/PlmG9HdzltU?feature=share

Domestically (not on exported cameras that are restricted to 9FPS), you can actually hit ~27FPS reasonably easily and with our built-in IMU this is in fact usable in flight. However, thermal is hard enough to interpret when stationary so the main use case for the THERMAL variant is once it is in the middle of a room or on a pole to search attics etc. However our visual cameras are super easy to work with in flight - if you download our app (Bounce Viewer) and go to the demo videos in History you can see it working on the back of a dog or thrown in the air.

And I mean thousands of these systems are in use around the world (of the visual, the thermal Pit Viper we just announced) and have been thrown through windows, down stairs, on ropes, poles, vehicles, dogs....

Perhaps the use case is to toss it into a potentially dangerous position, let it settle, and then take the shot? I don't see any claims that this is intended to operate while in motion.

These aren't meant to provide imagery in motion. The point is to provide a view from the point where the ball lands...

Midway-point between the authorities, or overshoot and see what's behind them. Depending on the scenery/layout placing 2-3 of these can make a big difference.

Also why not drop them from a small (less-noisy) drone? Drone with a camera can help surveil the situation from above, it can drop one of these balls, so you increase visibility by a lot.

We indeed do drop them from drones :-) (Francisco, Bounce CEO, new to posting here so sorry if I'm being incompetent)

These are intended to be used like grenades but for intelligence. If it fails or lands wrong it’s not a big deal the idea is they will pump these things out by the millions.

I doubt it's by the millions--unlike a grenade I think these will be recovered for reuse.

More like FPV drones; if you can recover them that’s great, but the expectation is that you’ll lose them and that’s fine.

Losing a $600 ball (or whatever the cost is) is better than losing a man.

> recovered for reuse

Sure. Right up until the red forces start leaving units behind that look exactly like your throwables. Merriment ensues.

Can't fake the encryption. The decoy bomblet won't respond to commands.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com