Day 10

Nice place to work

Today we started early again, we got to the valley around 8:30 AM. We headed out to get some points along the beach and I was happy to get walking because I was wearing my new boots. Thank you Amazon for getting me a new pair of hiking boots overnight. We hit our first point where the road from the valley hits Kamehakameha Hwy along the ocean. The problems were, there was a lot of wind blowing in from the ocean, we were taking a point right below some power lines, cliffs on one side and fast traffic, then ocean on the other side. It was a bit precarious to say the least. I was up to fly and I rocked it if I do say so myself 🙂 . Turns out that the flights got more challenging from there, not less. Our next point was a power pole along the highway, so this one was high wind, power lines, traffic, ocean and a suspicious resident. Not ideal conditions for flying a drone. We were already airborne by the time we noticed the suspicious resident, so we continued. On the next point we decided to take the flight from the other side of the road near the ocean and look towards the ocean pretending that we are using the drone over the water so people wouldn’t be suspicious of us. The one after that the resident was outside, so we decided to ask his consent, he was cool and let us do it. With all of these points, there was no good place to take off and land, so we had to have the co-pilot hold the quad and release it for take off and catch it for landing, which added a cool new challenge.

Guess what's under that tree

After the beach points we headed back inland and had to hop a fence to get back on the Kualoa Ranch property. While walking to our next point some cows got interested in us and started following, then they started running so we started running, next thing I knew, we were running from a bunch of cows towards an electric fence, that sounded like a bad situation. Luckily by the time we got to the fence, the cows stopped chasing and we were able to carefully remove one of the electric strands to get through the fence. Now that we were safely on the other side of the electric fence, we took another point and heard a buzzing over head. We knew that was one of the UAVs that they were talking about flying, so we headed back to base camp.

Once there, we got to see the different home brew UAVs that were brought in. They flew the X8 with the near infrared camera and then flew it with both the near infrared and the true color camera at the same time, it was really cool. The home brew UAV works with a GPS driven autopilot, but what’s better is that it allows for the operator to interrupt that and take over manual control. As part of the UAV team it was our responsibility to manage the data that comes off the UAV after it returns. We developed a naming convention for the folders so we can keep track of the data as it comes in. We stuck around to watch the pilot fly his other home brew copter that was a tri-copter made out of tupperware, paint sticks and ping pong balls, pretty awesome.

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It's base camp

Assembling the X8

Home brew tri-copter