We’re waiting for DJI to release their latest update for the number of people that have been rescued around the world with the help of drones. That number must be getting close to 300 hundred now. It was 279 during the DJI Airworks event that took place in October in Los Angeles. This story was shared by Romeo Durscher, DJI’s Senior Director of Public Safety Integration, and it is about an 84-year-old man who had been lost for more than 48 hours but luckily was found with help of a DJI Inspire 2 drone (DJI, Amazon). As the fall season in Estonia tends to get pretty cold, we are happy to report that the gentleman is safely back home now.

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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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A few months ago we saw the first photos of the DJI Multilink in Amsterdam. Now the Chinese drone maker issued a statement, officially announcing the DJI Multilink for the Inspire 2 Cendence controllers. The DJI Multilink retails for $99 and there is a combo of three DJI Multilinks that sells for $282. It is available starting right now. See below for more details.

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Late last year the first reports surfaced of drones unexpectedly falling out of the sky in the UK. Affected drones were from the Matrice and Inspire series. DJI issued an official statement and started an investigation into the issue. The Chinese drone maker subsequently released two different firmware updates to tackle the issue and now concludes the TB55 battery investigation, saying that the most recent firmware update resolved the problem. See below for DJI’s official statement.

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If you want to fly your drone over crowds of people, you need a waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The first such waiver was awarded to CNN using the Snap Drone from Vantage Robotics. Indemnis started working with DJI in 2017 to develop a parachute system for DJI drones so that flights over people might be allowed by the FAA. Today, Indemnis and DJI announced that the Indemnis Nexus parachute system for the DJI Inspire 2 drone has been validated as compliant with the new international standard for drone parachutes. The company hopes to be able to offer parachute systems for the Matrice 200 series and Matrice 600 series drones by late 2019.

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One of the challenges with wide angles lenses is barrel distortion. The wider a lens gets, the more distortion becomes an issue. Some lenses are specifically designed to correct this distortion. These lenses are called rectilinear lenses and they stretch the objects in the image, especially towards the edges, to make them appear straight. These kinds of lenses are also called zero-distortion lenses. Canon and Nikon make them for regular cameras and so does Venus Optics. However, Venus Optics has now created a version of their popular Laowa 9mm lens for the Zenmuse X7 camera that can be mounted on the Inspire 2. It is called the Laowa 9mm f/2.8 DL Zero-D lens.

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