This sounds really interesting! I'd love to see it when you're done.
I wasn't aware that my Nest thermostat was going to be End of Life'd, but I just finished replacing it with an older Honeywell/Zwave combo due to lack of features and general de-googleing. Would be great to do something with the hardware, which is really slick.
The goals have been 1. to help recycle hardware and keep it out of a landfill but more importantly 2. to have an open source thermostat with beautiful design. Nest cared a lot about the aesthetics. as do the people with whom I share my living space and for whom a thermostat has a minimum prettiness acceptable. The Honeywell/ZWave landscape has not shown itself to be "pretty" to me for the most part.
This is by design. Aside from the points raised by others on the reality of living next to the world's biggest superpower; our media landscape is fast becoming a monopoly. That monopoly is owned by Americans [1].
It's funny you mention PitViper, because they are by far the worst offender in my inbox. I've unsubscribed multiple times, I've marked as spam multiple times, yet somehow I still get the occasional marketing message in my Gmail inbox.
Oh wow! Not sure if it was this exact program, but I remember some similar sheep roaming my desktop when I was young. It had the ability to draw pictures in MS Paint, and would often do so when you were working on something...
NathanBuilds on YouTube has a little robot which does the same thing with a large magnifying glass. A concept I am very eager to demo on an industrial scale.
The advantage flying sprayers have over a tractor is loss. Driving a tractor through a field will crush a percentage of your crop, and a percentage of that crushed crop will never recover.
Depending on the field that percentage can be as high as 10. Depending on the crop, the value you gain by aerial application can be in the 10s of thousands of dollars.
That's a solved problem with precision guided, self-steering tractors. They also remember where they planted crops so they won't roll over plants later.
There's a lot of interesting stuff going on in agtech, most of it is practical, too. But yeah, guidance add-ons to a farmer's existing equipment has a pretty good return on investment for the farmer.
That’s an overly simplistic assertion. It depends on the crop, how it is planted, and maturity.
There is a soy bean pest that can invade crops on my family’s farm. If treatment is needed early, the cost effective solution is to drive a spray rig. Later in the season, that causes too much crop damage. So then it becomes a calculation of the loss due to pest versus cost of arial application.
In the end, it all comes down to cost per acre and the benefit needs to exceed that.
How tight are your rows that a high-boy or low-boy can't fit between them? When I still farmed, We sprayed late season crops with one of the two of those, with spray control to the square foot. That and auto steer meant we damaged about 40 plants total going into the end rows and out.
You're still not gaining much, right? You're just not losing what's already planted, but you could still plant more if you didn't have to drive in the first place - or do I misunderstand the precision driving?
By not having to drive a tractor through it regularly maybe crops can also be planted closer together? Although, there's still the harvesting at the end at which point you'd lose those gains again.
> Driving a tractor through a field will crush a percentage of your crop
Even if there are "tracks" to account for the tractor's wheels? Nothing would have been planted there in the first place?
I live in a rural area and there are huge grain fields all around me. At least for these kind of crops, the field is seeded 100%. There are no gaps for the tractor wheels. Having said that, you rarely see tractors pulling a sprayer in the first place anymore. Most crops around here are sprayed by purpose built sprayers that have tons of ground clearance, have relatively narrow tires, very wide booms, and are comparatively very light vs. a massive tractor. They can be built so light because they aren't used to pull heavy implements behind them. All they carry is the chemical, the spray booms, and the operator. Later in the season, it would be tough to pick out the path these things took through the field if you could at all. As for costs, the spraying is often done on contract so the farmers don't buy the sprayers in the first place: they pay for the service plus the chemicals.
For this kind of application, I think drones have a snowball's chance in hell of getting any kind of traction with farmers in the area. Their capacity is too small, their runtime is too short, the area they can cover per unit time is too poor, etc.
You are taking a very narrow view of what a drone is. The MQ-9A Reaper drone has an almost 2 ton payload capacity and flight endurance of 27 hours. I can totally envision a purpose built drone that could mount a crop dusters spray rig. It just most likely wouldn't be an electric quadcopter.
Seriously? That is a completely different animal from the drone portrayed in the article. Anything in that league wouldn't be anywhere near cost effective vs. something like a conventional crop sprayer plane.
I am serious that I can envision a drone that could be used for crop dusting. I personally wouldn't use a quad copter, but probably something more like a 20-30 foot flying wing powered by a small gas engine. My example of a predator drone was to illustrate that it is entirely possible to design a UAV that greatly exceeds the specs needed for crop dusting. I also think most people here are vastly underestimating what a Agricultural UAV is capable of. Take a look at this page https://store.tmotor.com/product/P80-v3-pin-kv100-p-type.htm... and some of their possible configurations.
I think just adding a gas engine to a quadcopter would give it enough endurance to make it useful. Obviously a crop duster is going to be fairly large to start with - it needs some space just to store the things it will spray.
Lol I was going to say: None of the hundreds of square miles of crops where I grew up have this problem. Maybe corn and soybean fields omit the structure to attempt to get more yield? In which case, crushing some of it is still likely a positive yield compared to not planting ruts.
Crush becomes a problem for us in Canola and Lentils during desiccation; which is a chemical application at the end of the season right before havest. As the name implies, desiccation takes a crop which might have variations in "greenness"/maturity and kills it all down to a consistent state for harvest.
At this point in the crops life, the canopy is quite filled out, and a large portion of it is already dry. By driving through the feild at this time you knock the seed from the pod onto the ground, where it is impossible to harvest. Thus it is better to do desiccation from the air.
Drones are going to be a large part of agriculture, but the problem isn't the technology. Imo the technology is already at a point where it's useful enough for me to invest in. If i wanted to today i could buy what i need for scouting and spraying a ~1000h farm from aliexpress.
The problem is the regulatory environment on two fronts. First ( in Canada) the pesticides I'd like to use are not registered for drone application, even if they are registered for application from helicopter or plane.
Second, I don't have priority airspace rights. Which means I have to have a person watching both the drone and surrounding airspace for crop dusters or personal low flying aircraft. Even if I file a flight plan weeks ahead of time and a NOTAM [notice to all airmen] i am required to ground my drone if an aircraft with a person is nearby. Even if they have failed to file NOTAMs, which in the case of my local spray dudes is 100% of the time. This makes completing a scouting or spraying job more labour intensive than using a tractor because I often require a spotter at the far end of a field.
Until the regulatory issues are sorted out, and drones can be operated with Beyond Visual Line of Sight rules, you won't see massa adoption of this tech.
My drone fleet is sitting and collecting dust at the moment, which is a shame because they do provide valuable information.
In the US, at least, regulatory solutions happen when large commercial interests get behind them. Commercial agribusiness is extremely powerful, so the lack of regulatory clarity will presumably disappear the second that large businesses decide they need to deploy this tech.
Verizon owned a drone startup, they even participated in congressional hearings related to drones, yet they still couldn't extract bvlos waivers from the FAA for testing. How much bigger and influencial should a party be?
As a pilot, this has always been weird to me. I’ve come to the conclusion that people just don’t like drones. I think selling them to the masses is part of the answer.
I can build a tower (with exemptions for protected airspace) that’s 199ft in the US without any problem. To me, that basically says to any pilot “expect the unexpected if you fly lower than that,” which insanely low to aircraft (not helicopters) not near an airfield.
> 199ft in the US .. which insanely low to aircraft (not helicopters) not near an airfield.
Not to geophysical exploration pilots running gravity, radiometrics, magnetics, etc in modified crop dusters at 80m ground clearance and 70m/s.
199 ft ~= 60m which a survey line might bottom out at when draping over ridges, etc.
Literally millions and millions of line kilometres are flown at those specifications, entire countries (like Mali, Fiji, Australia, etc) have been covered at 200m line separation.
Insanely low for yourself is pretty much just another day in the cockpit in just another month long survey job for survey pilots.
Not to mention actual crop dusting and other STOL grunt work.
Those pilots are in the minority, and already accept a much higher level of risk. Also, drone flights that have been problematic are typically in congested areas (much like laser problems).
What might have been better is if the FAA had created a way for those pilots to create mini low-level TFRs or protected airspace to warn drone pilots not to fly their during inspections. It’s also worth mentioning that many survey jobs are being replaced by more advanced drones due to cost.
I do respect what you are saying, but having a foot on both sides of the fence can’t help but feel like the FAA had a knee-jerk reaction to drones.
If I fly a 600g drone below treetop level in a heavily forested, rural area, it will have 0 impact to aviation. This is currently illegal without licensing, additional hardware, or a flight notification. I find this silly.
In the light aircraft domain working survey and dusting aircraft ideally work all the daylight hours with pilots on shift to take over as daily flight hours pass personal limits.
The economics are such that the planes are always aloft, parked at night, or being maintained.
Air Transport companies price light passenger and mail runs on the basis of daily, perhaps twice daily A->B runs, Air Tractor companies price on the basis of 100,000 line kilometres jobs completed as rapidly as possible in order to move onto the next, there's a backlog of mineral exploration and agriculture work demanding more craft and pilots.
> and already accept a much higher level of risk.
I'm sorry, are you saying that makes it OK to add more risk to low level drafting by just allowing any old drone up in the air anywhere at all?
Until some form of comprehensive regulation is resolved and upheld with drone operators required to get clearance for airspaces it's still better to err on the side of human safety now.
Depends on the operator, K.Geophysics operated for 25+ years with 15+ airframes (mostly fixed wing, some heli's) with zero deaths or crashes.
Another company bought them out and had three major crashes and five deaths with the next two years.
You can put that down to quality of maintainance and route planning.
One crash due to engine failure on takeoff and climbing, a second due to tangling with power lines that were not on the flight plan, the third I'm unsure but IIRC it was maintainance again.
By cause these were crashes caused by poor support surrounding the work rather than intrinsic risk of low flying .. of which only the power line tangle had an element of, which wouldn't have happened had the support team down their homework.
In a fixed wing, altitude is absolutely your friend and gives you more options to land, which equates to a higher probability of finding a nicer emergency landing spot.
And to your point, power lines that are shorter than 199ft don’t have to be on the charts. I could erect a tower off major airways or near an airport to that height without prior warning.
I bet agriculture drones rarely need to fly more than 50 feet up. They probably spend the majority of their time around 5m. I doubt air traffic would be a big concern outside legal restrictions that might not be fine grained enough to know the difference
You're very knowledgeable, this is great. Is there any automated tech on the market you've seen to do the spotting for you, so you can dynamically ground drones as air conditions change? Also, are you piloting all these manually (yknow, if they weren't gathering dust), is it a preset flight plan, or are you already experimenting with AI control? Would think even an LLM fed with air traffic sensor data could make the call to ground drones and switch between flight plans dynamically at this point - though I'd want it thoroughly tested and airing on the side of caution always. Also - what kind of height do you require for drone dusting? Could you get away with keeping it low to the ground, dusting only a few plants at a time at the expense of longer flight time and battery charging, but at least hopefully practically low enough to skirt any potential collision and legal issues, and potentially still entirely automated? Would think that kind of specificity also allows for stuff like dusting individual crop areas differently according to need, too.
All just thoughts from a programmer here - very cool you get to experiment with this kind of stuff in a practical setting. Hope it gets more practical soon!
Automated spotting is a bit of a bandaid, but might prove more useful as this situation drags on. I've thought about those raspberry pi flight trackers, but I don't think you can get the data I'm looking for from from Mode C Transponders, which is what I assume the small guys use. I haven't looked into it too deeply. The optics needed for a visual system are daunting, (the area I need to watch is large, and planes are small and fast!) but might be possible. A radar solution might be possible as well.
Based on my understanding of the technology I don't think this is the right application for an LLM, but perhaps more traditional algorithm coupled with a modification of the right-of-way rules would do the trick.
The drones I fly for scouting are on various premade flight plans. DroneDeploy.com offers a good application for mapping fields from 300' high, and FlyLitchi.com works well for custom paths (flying to one spot in the field, dropping down low to take a high resolution picture of the crop, then zipping back up and repeating several times.) I can't see much benefit to full AI control of the aircraft. The current mode of operation has them on preset "rails" with room for adapting to obstacles using ultrasonic sensors. I'd like some visual adaption capabilities, perhaps something to do with lidar and SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping), but my drones don't have these sensors, and the last time I looked into this a DIY solution was out of my wheelhouse.
I've only seen water trials of spray drones, but my understanding is the lower the better, within reason. depending on the vortices the aircraft generates the spray booms need to be about 4-6' off the canopy top, so ~15' total flight height. You can find a little bit of an overview here: https://sprayers101.com/drone-sprayers-are-we-ready/
Fascinating. Thank you for answering that all - I will definitely be looking back at this post one day if and when I get to play with this stuff myself. Appreciate the site links especially
Sounds like a lot of legal overhead is mainly what's standing between drone spraying... 30-60 day delay between plan submission and operation, not easy to keep that practical. Though at least yeah - 15' seems like a much more manageable height - hopefully that would at least be underneath any neighboring aircraft
Fair on the LLM - always use traditional algorithms if available and with effort/time for such things. LLMs are just the convenient duct tape / superglue to throw at handling edge cases with some confidence they'll generally use common sense about it. Untrained intern equivalent which can be combined with the algorithms if they're brittle.
If the local spray pilots aren't filing their paperwork and presumably not getting in trouble, isn't it reasonable that no one would care if you did the same?
It sounds like no one is enforcing those rules/laws.
NOTAMs are largely optional especially for things like making cropdusting passes in uncontrolled areas.
In this context the local pilots aren't out of compliance with any rules. The regulatory issue is that for almost all purposes human piloted craft have priority over remotely piloted craft, and there isn't a good way, currently, to communicate with pilots in the area.
Believe it or not, there are parts of the US, rural areas especially, where it is perfectly legal to fly an airplane without a radio or any other electronics.
All of these ag planes are operating under VFR, they can see each-other, largely they don't need to talk to each other, and don't need to know what exactly every plane in the vicinity is doing. It doesn't seem like it should work, but midair collisions between planes just aren't very common.
For planes, not filing an optional NOTAM for routine work is about as risky as not getting a police escort vehicle to go buy groceries. If we start allowing RC/autonomous cars on the roadway that place other drivers at risk, we might start wanting to file our grocery buying plans so we don't die. Or we would just say that you can't drive your RC car on the road when other road users are present.
In 2010 I biked through a lot of Japanese countryside and saw quite a few drones (of the helicopter variety) spraying crops. They seemed human-controlled, but still, way ahead of their time.
The future of drones, especially in dense areas may require some sort of technological solution like that, but for the time being out in the boonies here I would love for the rules to change so that the first 300' or so of airspace above my property is "claimed."
How is that going to work with civil VFR aircraft, including helicopters? ADS-B Out still isn't even required in some classes of airspace. The notion of retrofitting every old R-22 with TCAS is ludicrous.
Was just thinking out loud, as a layman, along the lines of how not to wait for top down regulation, but still going around the practical problem of avoiding in both senses, the actual collision and the authorities eyes on you :)
I don't even know the acronyms you gave, going on a rabbit hunt now
This might be ripe for self-piloting drones. Let the human crop dusters fly in daylight. While the farmer programs the night mission. And the automatic drones take over at night.
For those who are curious, here is the office view of my own "Spaceship tractor cab." https://imgur.com/a/ebUlEVy
Devices:
Tractor - 1979 Versatile 875. Indestructible. Used for planting with a 40' air seeder.
Trimble 500 - This is now a redundant GPS receiver which provides a special NEMA string to the device below it. Will stay in operation until I can figure out how to reliably duplicate said string via the primary GPS.
PF3000 - Old reliable. This computer allows rudimentary tracking of loads to allow for seed and fertilizer rate experiments. Data is saved to a CF card for later transfer to SMS Basic or QGIS.
CF-D1 Tablet - This handy bright touchscreen handles the signal from the primary GPS and RTK towers. It communicates with various sensors and a DC motor to steer the machine. Runs AgOpenGPS, a incredible godsend of a project which allows these kind of autosteer retrofits on old tractors for dirt cheap.
Various camera screens to monitor the operations of an Air Seeder. You know what's cheaper and more reliable than airflow and runout sensors? Cameras. :) Hopefully I'll be able to upgrade these to IP cameras this spring, but for now they're all various brands of cheap wired "backup cameras."
Agtron sensor monitor (canbus I think?) - This is supposed to monitor shaft RPMS and other various functions for the Air Seeder. It kinda works, but most functions are broken.
AtomJet Aux Hydraulic system - Allows older tractors to handle newer more intensive implements.
AgopenGPS control board (V2.. I think) - Takes Wheel Angle sensor data, GPS data, and Motion sensor Data, stews it all up on an Arduino nano and feeds that to the steeringwheel motor.
Ardusimple GPS RTK2B - Primary GPS receiver and NEMA string generator.
Not pictured - A streamdeck MK2 set up to control AgOpenGPS functions. Of dubious usefulness. :)
Other future upgrades - Replacing the main hydraulic manifold block with electronic solenoids. This should allow AgOpenGPS to raise and lower the implement automatically, as well as control various functions of the air seeder. One more step on the road to total automation!
Is there anywhere I can anonymously upload an image to show off my own "spaceship tractor cab?" It's been awhile since I've tried, and it seems imgur no longer allows non-users to do this.
While at uni, I worked on a local fishing boat doing (amongst many things) hardware/software integration, and did some work on equipment communicating via NMEA. Very fun blast-to-the-past, didn't know the standard was used outside of marine environments.
I hate to use this thread as a general forum for complaints against YouTube, but I've come across some concerning behavior.
I've gotten fed up with the app, so this morning I decided to use Firefox mobile to play a video on YouTube.com
Whenever the video plays, my microphone turns on. The thing is I have my microphone permissions in Firefox turned off, with no exceptions. Has anyone else encountered this behaviour?
I did some more digging just now since this was bugging me so much. Behavior persisted after restarting firefox.
Under firefox settings/site permissions the microphone is "Blocked by Android"
So I decided to double check my android settings, and was greeted by some splash page explaining what the permissions settings page was for. (Perhaps this page appeared after a recent update?)
After clearing the page I see Firefox microphone permissions sitting in the "ask every time" catagory. Im 100% sure i did not get asked or give permission for microphone usage.
I go back to Firefox and YouTube no longer accesses my microphone when playing a video. The only variable I can think of was clearing that splash page. Mysterious. :)
I wasn't aware that my Nest thermostat was going to be End of Life'd, but I just finished replacing it with an older Honeywell/Zwave combo due to lack of features and general de-googleing. Would be great to do something with the hardware, which is really slick.