Hi,
I´m a designer and artist living in germany. I´m looking for a sollution for mapping crop fields with a drone.
What would be the cheapest sollution for doing so? I would like to buy a Drone Wing that I can program and it maps an area. But I´m new to this. Any ideas or tips about a “Beginner Wing” that costs less then 500€ or 550$? The projects I´m working on is for finding deer babies in corn fields before harvesting and leaf color control for seeing if a field needs water in different areas.
Best Wishes!
Timo
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I use a Mavic 2 Pro and use apps as Pix4D or Good station on iPhone for automated flight. I think you should at least have a drone with 20mp.
Hi Andreas,
thank you for the tip!
I think I would rather have something like a Swan-K1 PRO or a familiar drone type.
It doesn’t seam to be able to have a down facing camera.
Welcome!
The Parrot Anafi will be close to your price-point most of the year, and usually will dip below it for the holiday season.
Parrot is also the parent-company of Pix4D, so that sUAS is incredibly well-supported by Pix4D Capture for flight planning, and the SDK is available, so it can be supported by other flight planners.
Their whitepaper also indicates that it is MAVLINK2 compatible, which should mean it can be controlled by anything in the PX4/ArduPilot ecosystem, but I can not get confirmation on this yet.
For the record Metatron, a commercial cheap fixed wing is something that is in dire need for the mapping field. Most cheap fixed wing mapping drones are DIY, while commercial fixed wing drones are $$$. There definitely is quite a gap between the two.
Unfortunately I am yet to find a commercial offering that makes any sense. Most companies are selling fixed wings business-to-business so the price tags are quite hefty. You could try to pay someone to make you a cheap fixed wing drone, but that will of course come with limited support and smaller RC-based problems you wouldn’t encounter with a consumer quadcopter.
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I see that HEQ sells the Swan with a mapping package, downward facing camera and PPK but it is in the $5-6000 US price range.
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Hi,
For the planning and operation of the drone (a Mavic Mini) I use the web platform “Drone Harmony” and its respective app for Android. Image processing is performed by WebODM on an i5 machine with only 8GB of RAM. I limited to 80 photos to get products satisfactorily in a time around 1:30h. I tested it using the Lightning node and the same work took 8 minutes, which for the cost is worth more than investing in an upgrade or computer replacement.
Hugs from Brazil.
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You have taken into account the cost of insurance and the AESA certificates to be able to fly in BVLOS mode?, I deduce that a drone wing is for flight distances greater than 500 m which is the limit in Spain for the open category A3, I do not know the case of Germany, if you are in category A3, the insurance for these drone-operators is approximately 20 euros per year(hobby), if you want to fly further up to 1000 m distance, 2000 m maximum with the help of an observer at 1000 m you need the STS02 certificate, cost of the course € 400, and a more professional insurance that can reach about 250-300 euros per drone, if you go up more than 60 m you have to publish a NOTAM, notice to airmen, to warn the rest of the pilots of manned aircraft … conclusion begins with a small drone, C0 less than 250gr; C1 less than 900 gr with the ability to schedule photogrametry flights in the open category A3 … and look for the one that makes the least noise if you want to observe fauna directly
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as others have pointed this out before, a really cheap solution is a DIY one. If you don’t want to start from scratch, take a look at the Parrot Disco (discontinued), but you will go over the budget anyways. Cheap Fixed Wing Mapping - Blogs - diydrones
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Oh, I’ve read further, so you need an UAV with a thermal camera for “Rehkitzrettung”. You don’t need it for mapping purposes, only to find the deer babies. You would be better off buying something like a
or an
so what you need is a thermal imaging device therefore you will blow your budget big time.
Plus all the necessary insurance (Haftpflichtversicherung) and registration according to your country.
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I’ll throw in this as another option:
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