Drone advice?

[rob_s]

God I keep wanting Skydio to get their shit together.

We use drones at work (commercial general contractor, little government work and no fed work) my department manages our program and we have 4 pilots on my team. We currently only own one drone ourselves (we outsource a lot of it and then we just work with the data) and it's a Mavic 2, iirc. We have requested approval to buy a new Mavid 3 E. I myself and not licensed but I have taken a lot of the prep courses and have a decent understanding of how this all works.

If I were buying as a hobbyist I'd be looking at the models that are under the weight requirement to be registered. Not because of anything other than simply preferring to be off paper. I believe that basically comes down to this guy.

https://www.dji.com/mini-3-pro

As to the DJI software sometimes preventing you from flying, that's a real thing. We have had cases where we have FAA authorization/waiver, out the info into the app, and due to one bug or some setting we missed, the drone won't take off.

[hickrev]

God I keep wanting Skydio to get their shit together.

Right? Like “no, I don’t want to pay $3,000 a year per drone (on top of the $15k/each startup cost) for your crappy scan service that I will still have to put into Pix4D to get a usable CAD surface anyways. Oh, and your automation is great, but I’m still going to have to fly it manually to get closeup pictures because I can’t attach a 3D model to an RFI response and your camera is worse than a $1,500 DJI’s”

Rant over.

I’m on the engineering and operations side, but my team’s use cases are virtually the same as yours, and Skydio seems to want to push everyone towards subscription-based automation that isn’t really needed (and doesn’t match up with current regulations) instead of providing the basics for professional use at a reasonable, one time price.

[rob_s]

We have an enterprise agreement with DronDeploy. I hear the output from pix is “better” but also more of a manual process that requires more local storage and DroneDeploy has other things going for it (like integrations with Procore that allow us to create an Rfi right in DroneDeploy and push to Procore).

[nalesq]

Is there a relatively muggle friendly “Glock 19” of FPV drones?


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[rob_s]

Is there a relatively muggle friendly “Glock 19” of FPV drones?


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We have no use for that tech in my business.

I’d still look to start and end with whatever dji is selling.

https://store.dji.com/product/dji-avata-no-rc-goggles

[whomever]

So ... I'm the guy who just ordered his first drone, a DJI Mini 2 SE, $300. It hasn't even gotten here yet, which tells you how much I know.

With that said, there are two kinds of drones: FPV and, I dunno, 'normal'. The FPV ones are what you want to do drone races or fly grenades into Russian tanks. The Avata is an FPV drone.

The ones most people use to put a camera in the sky to look at the ground are the 'normal' ones. You don't use the virtual reality goggles, you use screen (often a phone) attached to a controller sort of like a video game controller. If an eye-in-the-sky is what you want, I don't think you want an FPV drone, but I'm happy to be corrected.