New Pilot & New Purchase - Help me choose/proposals

Hardware Multirotors
1

Hey All, I’m putting a DIYish drone together for my site, a landfill, and I’d like to ensure as much hardware compatibility with ArduPilot and open source in general as possible.

Site Requirements: A Fixed location, a landfill, with 5-10 acres of weekly surveys to assess 3d topography. Typical wind 10-15 mph, but upto 40-100 mph (great plains/midwest).

Software selection: Open Drone Map, OpenSplat, QGround Control, FindGCP w/ArUco GCP

Budget/Objectives: $15k-20k; <1inch vertical precision; PPK w/fixed & deployable GCPs

Currently, I’ve fixed a target on the: https://uavsystemsinternational.com/products/aurelia-x4-standard

It comes with LE batteries for 40 minutes flight time, either a HereLink Black or Skydroid H16. The Cube Orange due to cost. We’d throw in the retractable landing gear to improve wind resistance, 2 year warranty, servicing kit, extra batteries.

The payloads would be:
Gimbal: https://gremsy.com/pixy-lr-categories/gimbal-pixy-lr/pixy-lr-store
Camera (~61 MP): ILX-LR1 - Sony Pro and a lens for survey. I haven’t gotten that far, but it’s missed.

Loadout weight then looks like:

  1. Drone w/LE Battery (max 1500g payload): 2450g
  2. Payload, gimbal: 495g
  3. Payload, Camera: 243g

For PPK, we’d setup a base station following this DIY route:
https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/how-to-build-a-diy-gnss-reference-station/all

In general, I got to around 15k.

Does anyone think this won’t achieve budget/objective? I know Sony is a reliable camera dealer, but beyond that, I’ve just been going off all the pretty pictures and technical specs. Since it’s DIYish, I’m mostly concern it won’t all fit together neatly. I have been talking to vendors, but the most responsive one so far wants to push the ready made commercial lockins with software subscriptions.

Any feedback is well recieved!

2

That is a nice budget and should be able to accomplish what you are looking to do. One of the hardest things is making everything fit. Vendors often go through multiple iterations of designs to get everything fitting neatly together and make sure there is no heat or interference issues. That is also a interesting camera I have never seen that camera. I have used the rx1rii, a6000 and the A7. May have to get one of those to test. Emlid has nice dual freq gps as does holybro. I have used both with great success. Just getting RTK capable systems doesn’t necessarily mean instantaneous cm level precision. there are plenty of environmental conditions that can affect that accuracy but is achievable.

3

Do you know if the dual GPS more accurate or is it simply a fallback system? I know we’re going to go after PPK and not RTK as it gives a bit more freedom with a little bit more site work.

If everything goes smoothly, we’re probably look at mimicing these https://store.propelleraero.com/ GPC by adding some more rovers & radios.