Now the talk is that self driving cars will displace human driven ones. Simply your insurance will go up, a lot, if you human drive, until in less than a decade only the rich can afford to take the wheel. And few will bother.
The good news is being driven will be safer and commutes will be eased.
Naturally there will be pressure both from voters and politicians unholy urges to regulate others, to outlaw human driven cars. They will become an unacceptable hazard.
And commutes will be reduced under U.N. Agenda Twenty One rules intended to make all subjects live in cities to promote sustainability.
Can an autodrive car culture tolerate motorcycles? I fear not. We may be the last generation to know how to ride.
I wish the above was a paranoid fantasy.
Drones, for various reasons will be first. They've been working for years to eliminate pesky Piper Cubs and other private planes...... by limiting them with equipment rules. No transponder, bigger and bigger chunks of sky are off limits. Commercial airlines pay more taxes and far more people fly Southwest than Cessna.
Btw, putting a new encoding transponder in your plane is freaking expensive. Think how much it would cost to put a new engine in your car to be allowed to drive on the highway. More than that.
This drone interference with the wild fire will have results we don't want.... the first bozo who causes an AIRLINER crash with one will wreck the hobby so fast..... Don't believe me? Go buy lawn darts.
This isn't speculation. I'm following the airplane threads. People are very angry ( about the interference with fire fighting ) and scared ( about FAA response )
The experienced drone guys will have plenty of custom built recommendations. But if you have never flown, and have a moderate budget, you can't go wrong with a phantom to start out with. If you have no idea what you are looking for, at least these have everything you need to get running with a huge third-party market for add-ons as well as lots of forums.
The safety mechanisms built in and flight control help the novice get up and running from the first flight.
If you have the bucks, the Phantom 3's are turnkey with FPV. If you read some forums and get some advice, picking up a Phantom 2 new or used and adding FPV is easy and less money.
I wanted to use my GoPro, so I use a video transmitter to get it down to my FlySight monitor for FPV. With the OSD, I have full telemetrics.
I just about lost my Phantom this weekend shooting this video. I forgot to anchor the boat before liftoff, so my Phantom took that location as home. After my filming session, my boat had drifted a 100 yards. When my battery was down to 10% it decided to go up to a safe height and fly back to the center of the lake.
Let's just say I hand landed that sucker just as she was coming down within 2 meters of the water!!!
Back to the fun. Here is what I shot on Friday. I think it turned out well. It's nice to shoot in 1080/60 so that I can slow down the action.
There was something either seriously wrong with that window, or that must have been a substantial drone.
There probably needs to be a "pigeon rule" of some kind... Drones that weigh less than a pigeon and can't fly faster than a pigeon are considered toys, drones that weigh more are considered unmanned aerial vehicles and start to get the heavy rules (just based on their ability to do damage when things go wrong).
(That might have been a swallow too, I was chasing them at the time, badly, and some did fly by. It was only in one frame, and a $40 drone does not have a very good camera )
Where I work, we do quite a few very large WiFi installs and sometimes vendors send out sample antenna for me to test.
Last night I rigged one of the patch antenna to my video receiver on my drone remote. I pushed my drone out to 1000m at about 260m altitude and was streaming video the whole way!! I was pretty impressed although man of the hobby drone guys have done much further. I don't see myself needing to go out half that distance on most occasions.
Posted on Thursday, September 17, 2015 - 12:07 pm:
2 miles stock is amazing!
The "proposed" legislation is all over the board right now. The biggest issue with trying to regulate the hobby is the fact that folks are creating new drones every day that don't fit the mold of what the legislation would be written around. Weight and size are about as far as they can define them by.
The commercially produced phantoms already have those sorts of controls in them. In fact the latest firmware has more no-fly zones programmed in which actually limit the phantom if trying to launch in a designated no-fly zone.
Posted on Saturday, September 19, 2015 - 08:08 am:
its all in who defines it. Many will call any UAV a drone. Since all RC copters are unmanned, it's a drone by most definition
The post above about someone building a rideable drone goes against that definition as it's obviously manned. They just built it with RC sized engines.
Posted on Saturday, September 19, 2015 - 11:14 am:
I'd worry about a visit from men in suits with no sense of humor over froggy's gif. I'm reasonable sure it runs afoul of NFA (aow) and likely FAA rules.
And on an unrelated note (I promise! My $50 husban won't carry anything) I replaced my camera after an unfortunate dunking in a pool that killed it. The thing was flaky from the start anyway, so no big deal. Got a replacement camera from ebay for $20, neat little unit, slapped right in. For the price and quality, I'm thinking about using it elsewhere.
Just to revive the Quadcopter thread. I had a couple more videos from this past fall and early winter.
This was of my buddy's new lake lot. We carved a route through the trees down to the lake.
This one is of the first ice on our pond out back. My wife insisted it was not froze over, so I had to do a fly-by and bounce it off the ice to show that it was.
