News site covering small unmanned aircraft systems, with reports on drones, regulation, hardware, and crashes.
HN commenters cite it as a source on drone hardware, such as DJI's OcuSync being based on LTE, and on drone and aircraft accidents.
For anyone else who was curious about the drone photographing an environmental violation, here's the denouement and the company's side of the story. In short, the Ondruseks state that an unmaintained government-controlled sewer pipe was responsible for the leak.
Your reaction to this story will depend on whether you believe businessmen are mustache-twirlers who pollute rivers...or whether you believe that the kind of government that leaves potholes unfilled for years might jump into action to shift blame and point fingers rather than accept responsibility. From my POV, there doesn't seem to be much motive to intentionally dumping blood into a river rather than down a sewer line, so I kind of think the Ondruseks might be telling the truth.
http://www.suasnews.com/2012/12/20401/columbia-packing-co-indicted-for-pigs-blood-in-trinity-river/
A Dallas County grand jury returned several indictments on
Wednesday against an Oak Cliff meat packing company
accused of dumping animal blood in a creek that flows into
the Trinity River.
Columbia Packing Company and its owner, Joe Ondrusek,
face twelve indictments for water pollution.
If found guilty, the company could pay fines between
$6,000 and $1.5 million. Ondrusek himself could get
five years in prison and fined up to $100,000 for each
count.
The grand jury also found evidence that the company,
Joe Ondrusek and family member Donny Ondrusek tampered
with physical evidence and returned six counts…
A lot of people are ignoring the fact that SoftBank Group is also one of the largest players in the telco market globally (that's how they started) [0] and that played a role in their Arm strategy and Eutelsat OneWeb strategy.
It's useful to look at the Ampere acquisition from the same lens, as Ampere is heavily used for telco usecases [1]
SoftBank Group has heavily invested in O-RAN to act as the base technology for what will become 6G, and they have been making a number of partnerships, investments, and acquisitions specifically around this [2][3].
SoftBank has been working on a 6G/Beyond 5G strategy for several years now [4] - primarily targeting embedded usecases such as autonomous vehicles [5][6]
[0] - https://www.softbank.jp/en/
[1] - https://amperecomputing.com/press/ampere-accelerates-expansion-into-telecom
[2] - https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/news/press/sbkk/2024/20240228_01/
[3] - https://www.o-ran.org/membership
[4] - https://www.suasnews.com/2021/08/softbank-corp-unveils-6g-concept/
[5] - https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/technology/research/news/051/
[6] - https://www.softbank.jp/en/corp/technology/research/news/069/
Congrats to the DroneDeploy team.
https://www.dronedeploy.com/blog/dronedeploy-hits-break-even-raises-strategic-15m-to-fuel-construction-progress-ai-product [$15M strategic raise, breakeven reached 2025Q4]
https://www.globenewswire.com/fr/news-release/2021/02/04/2169787/0/en/DroneDeploy-Secures-50M-to-Accelerate-Development-Beyond-Drones-and-Solidify-Global-Market-Leadership.html [$50M Series E]
https://www.dronedeploy.com/blog/new-series-funding-announcement [$35M Series D]
https://www.suasnews.com/2018/06/dronedeploy-raises-25m-of-series-c-funding-to-bring-drones-to-every-job-site/ [$25M Series C]
https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/24/dronedeploy-raises-20-million-to-help-any-business-put-drones-to-work/ [$20M Series B]
https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/31/dronedeploy-series-a/ [$9M Series A]
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/09/19/dronedeploy-raises-2m-to-make-drones-easy-to-fly-for-any-business/ | https://archive.today/fUk9y [$2M Seed Raise]
How is this different from all the other companies doing this?
- TeraRanger [1]
- DJI (Phantom) [2]
- Neurala [3]
- Intel / Yuneec [4]
- Aevo [5]
Then there's the work at MIT [6], which is open source (Github code: [7])
[1] http://www.teraranger.com/drone-flies-in-the-forest-with-collision-avoidance/
[2] http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2500144,00.asp
[3] http://www.neurala.com/technology/collision-avoidance-drones/
[4] http://www.pcworld.com/article/3019468/ces/intel-demos-collision-avoidance-drone-that-will-go-on-sale-this-year.html
[5] http://www.suasnews.com/2015/05/new-collision-avoidance-unit-for-small-drones-available/
[6] http://www.roboticstrends.com/article/watch_mit_drone_autonomously_avoids_obstacles_at_30_mph
[7]
Looking further, the problem isn't so extreme: http://www.suasnews.com/2015/08/37585/china-tightens-controls-on-drone-and-powerful-computer-exports/
"From August 15, manufacturers of certain powerful drones and computers will have to give technical details to the authorities to obtain a licence prior to export, Xinhua news agency says.
The new regulations from the Ministry of Commerce and the General Administration of Customs are aimed in particular at drones which can fly for more than one hour and at heights of more than 15,420 metres."
So basically, drones powered by internal combustion engines need to be design-certified.
DJI OcuSync is based on LTE: https://www.suasnews.com/2022/05/the-dji-p1-and-s1-fpv-chipset-its-not-all-that/ is an example of more information.
This is a major advantage DJI and other Chinese drone makers have over US based ones. Technically acquiring an SDR/DSP implemented LTE baseband is not a major difficulty. Getting Qualcomm to let you is quite a challenge.
Looking at FCC listings and product pages you can tell that DJI are also throwing power at the problem. The EIRP on DJI devices is very high. They go up to 33dBm (2W EIRP) on the most modern devices like the Mini 4 Pro.