Haye Kesteloo

DJI rolls out Geofencing 2.0 to airports and other sensitive facilities in 32 European countries in an effort to prevent any future Gatwick-like drone fiasco’s. After the recent drone scares at Gatwick, Heathrow, and Newark, it comes as no surprise that DJI rolls out their Geofencing 2.0, officially called Geospatial Environment Online (GEO) 2.0 system, to Europe. The upgraded system was already deployed in the US since October 2018.

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After having used the DJI Matrice 210 for the first time in a training session earlier in the morning, the Halifax firefighters successfully used the unmanned aircraft in a search-and-rescue later that same day. On a dark and cold night in December the firefighters decided to send their new drone up one more time in their search for a missing person. The search had officially been called off, but the firefighters went ahead anyway. This time they used a different angle with their thermal camera and they found the semi-conscious man under a bridge. The man was picked up and rushed to the hospital. It was a turning point for the firefighters and they realized drones are much more than just a toy.

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Late October 2018, DJI organized Airworks 2018 in Dallas, Texas. The conference was aimed at commercial and enterprise drone applications. During the event, DJI launched the Mavic 2 Enterprise. The conference was opened with a two-and-a-half hour lasting DJI Keynote, but probably equally interesting to most attendees were all the break-out sessions and workshops that were organized by DJI and a host of other companies active in the commercial and enterprise drone market. We had already uploaded the DJI Keynote with timestamps to YouTube, now you can also get access to all the 63 workshops and training sessions that took place during the event. DJI offers you all the DJI Airworks 2018 conference session recordings for $249, which in my view is a small price to pay to get access to a treasure of knowledge and experience.

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Yesterday was the opening of the European Youth Olympic Festival (EYOF 2019) at the Asim Ferhatović Hase Olympic Stadium in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. A drone was in the air to capture 4K footage of the spectacular event that was accompanied by parades, the Olympic flame, music, and fireworks.

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Landmines or anti-personnel explosives have been prohibited since 1977, however, so many of them have been used around the world that they continue to kill or injure around 10 people per day. The mines are hidden from sight and some of them, like the Russian-made Butterfly mine, are near impossible to detect with traditional mine-sweeping techniques. Two college students at New York’s Binghamton University, however, have found a solution to spot these landmines by using hacked consumer drones, such as a DJI Phantom, outfitted with infrared cameras.

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As you probably know, Amazon already has a fairly large number of drone delivery patents. However, earlier this month the e-commerce giant received their latest patent. This one is designed to guide drones to their destinations and to verify that the delivery by drone has been made at the correct address. Amazon filed for the patent back in 2016 and was awarded the patent “Drone Marker and Landing Zone Verification” on February 5th, 2019.

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Granted there is not much to say about this video other than that it shows awesome skills from both the pilot operating the FPV race drone as well as the mountain biker. FPV race drones equipped with an action camera AND in combination with skilled athletes provide some of the most amazing footage we have seen. Enjoy this video from Vincent Tupin, who recently uploaded this video to YouTube.

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In the UK, a man from Walton used a drone to fly drugs into a prison facility. However, the drone crashed and the man was arrested. He has now been sentenced and ends up in jail himself for five years. This is not the first time that drones were used to fly contraband into a prison facility.

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You’d like to fly your drone in NYC? Well, it is probably best to watch this video first. Griffin Hammond does a great job explaining why it’s mostly illegal to fly your drone in NYC. He lists four main reasons as to why he, even as an FAA-certified pilot, can’t fly drones in New York City. There’s a fifth reason, not mentioned in the video, that should also warn you against flying your unmanned aircraft in the big apple. Luckily there are a few places where you can still legally fly and you will not be hunted down by the NYPD.

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For the GoPro Awards, the action camera company invites people to submit the most amazing GoPro footage they can record. Well, this video of an FPV drone flying in between the parachute strings of a BASE jumper qualifies as some of the craziest FPV drone footage, we have seen. Check it out in the video below.

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Today, the South China Morning Post had an interesting story about how DJI went from a dorm project to ultimately global drone domination in a very short time. The Shenzhen-based company generated total sales of 2.7 billion USD in 2017, an 80% jump versus the previous year, making Frank Wang Tao the founder of the drone manufacturer, the youngest Chinese billionaire.

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We have seen artists use drones before to light paint shapes in the sky, however never as elaborate or advanced as what Russel Klimas has done. He uses hundreds of waypoints in Litchi to accurately paint a figure with light (and a drone) in the sky. With enough work and preparation, the possibilities of drone light painting using waypoints and Litchi are pretty much endless. Check it out.

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This is a quite long but interesting video for any of you who may have crashed or otherwise damaged their DJI Spark drone and are looking to possibly fix it yourselves. Adamant IT from the YouTube channel “Let’s fix computers” shows us how you can take a DJI Spark apart and transplant all the internal components to a new DJI Spark body shell. The big question after the transplant, of course, is will it fly again?

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In an open letter, DJI pledges to take ‘painful’ steps to ‘eliminate these problems’, referring to the widespread corruption that was discovered by DJI during routine audits late in 2018. The uncovered corruption adds up to a total loss of $150M, but it may only be ‘the tip of the iceberg’, according to the drone maker. Dozens of employees have been fired or turned in to local law enforcement. In the letter, DJI explains that in the past the company has ’emphasized corporate growth over new internal processes,’ but that it will need to take ‘a leading role in developing clear policies, procedures and expectations to address corner-cutting and employee theft’ in order to become a mature company. You can read their entire statement below.

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DJI has been busy this week with all their firmware updates. Today the Chinese drone manufacturer released their latest firmware update for the popular DJI Osmo Pocket. The previous firmware update was only three weeks ago and improved sound quality, ActiveTrack, focus and white balance. This latest update promises to improve face detection, reduce focus pulsing, increase autofocus speed, add pro settings to the Osmo Pocket without the use of the DJI Mimo app, added Cine-Like color more to video mode and added an option to switch between AFC and AFS when using the Osmo Pocket without the Mimo app.

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DJI also released a new firmware update for the DJI Inspire 2. This latest firmware update enable the Inspire 2 to work with the DJI Multilink that was released on January 21st. It can be used as a master or slave controller in the master-slave controller network. Let us know what your experience has been flying the Inspire 2 with the Multilink setup. Keep in mind that updating the firmware on the DJI Inspire 2 can take quite some time. Probably best not to do it right before a job.

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