Greetings!

[cmccurdy]

I’ve been lurking hard on this forum for the past few months (I check it every day), and I thought it might be time to introduce myself.

I work at a Kentucky-based civil engineering & land surveying company that operates primarily in the telecom industry. I have about 3 years of experience doing survey drafting, 1 year of field surveying experience, and I spent the better part of this past year managing some of our survey projects.

In September I was asked to help build and manage a drone department, so I’ve spent the past few months in a self-guided crash course in all things UAV and photogrammetry . Right now the department is 2 people (me and the pilot), and we’re doing a LOT of planning and testing. In fact that’s pretty much all we’ve done

We’ve done test-flights of cell towers, and a few mapping flights of our office building using GCPs, most of which I have processed using ODM on Google Compute Engine. We’re using a Phantom 4 Pro V2, and I’d be happy to share some of my data sets. I have 4 tower data sets and 2 nadir mapping datasets: 2 flights of the same area at different altitudes & overlaps, with (poorly marked) GCPs.

Anyway, I think we’re about to get approval for several ALTA survey projects that we plan on using the drone for, and I’m excited!

I don’t have enough technical knowledge to provide any help with coding, but I bought the ODM book and I’ll be keeping an eye out for any new funding campaigns

[pierotofy]

Hey @cmccurdy ! Welcome!

Would be cool to see the datasets! Feel free to share them in the datasets section.

[coreysnipes]

Welcome! It’s great to have your perspective on the ODM tools. As you were starting out, were there any areas that were particularly tricky in getting the software working? I’m working with a few people on some documentation and training materials for the project, and I believe that the first steps of getting it working and tuned to your org’s needs are often the most challenging. We lose a lot of users at that stage. The ODM book is a great resource of course, and if there’s more we can do in software/docs/videos/etc we’d like to improve it.

[cmccurdy]

I don’t think I had too much trouble with ODM. Much of my time was spent familiarizing myself with Google Compute Engine. Once I got past that and was able to get WebODM installed on a VM without any issues, that’s when I saw the real value of WebODM and not being limited by the processing power of my desktop workstation.

By the way, I would highly recommend Google Compute Engine to anyone wanting to experiment with WebODM in the cloud. I received $300 in credits just for making an account, and I’ve only used about $120 of it running dozens of tests in the past 2 months.

I’m in the process of editing my little tutorial on using WebODM in GCE, I’m hoping to submit it soon™. I figured out a way to make GCE work reasonably well for me, though it might benefit from having someone more knowledgeable look it over.