Nonlaser things that I think GFers will find interesting

it’s not a huge difference in speed for me, but my mind is reading each individual word in the all caps and i’m picking up more than one word at a time in the sentence case.

Yeah, I guess that makes some sense given that the sentence caps, the punctuation, and capital case for proper names would give most people some context clues…

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the ascenders and descenders are huge visual cues to the shape of words. you don’t get those in all caps.

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I have little problem in general as the actual letters are often below the ability of my eye to define them. The downside of that is getting the word wrong which though often humorous can be embarrassing. Like Rotel–Ratel comes to mind at the moment.

Disney star wars drone show over Lisbon:

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cd0QM4HKUtb/

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The shape, that must be what was so wrong. I felt like I was walking barefoot through sandspurs.

Another for the drone users out there, a full walkthrough of operating a commercial agricultural spraying drone:

I had no idea DJI got into this space. The battery charging rate is crazy.

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Now I want to setup a rig and start doing this for the local farmers. Seems like it would be a good gig.

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I haven’t priced it, but their other commercial drones aren’t cheap.

EDIT:

Hmm, the site is one of those “contact us for pricing” deals.

Let’s see what the rest of the internet says…

Hmm looks to be around $19,000 based on a few sites that I saw. Battery life is warrantied to last about 4900 acres, at 40 acres/hour… that means 122 hours per battery, three batteries seems to be a reasonable set, so about 360 hours of operation, which is a break even cost of $52/hr just based on the drone costs, nothing else (ignoring consumables, labor, capital machinery etc). With all of the ancillary cost it’d need to be a lot more than that to break even. I have zero idea how much it costs to spray a field conventionally, this calculation of cost/benefit is complicated and requires a whole lot more knowledge about farm economics than I have at my fingertips.

(also of note that $52/hr is based on the warrantied lifecycle of the battery, it might be much longer than that)

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I just wonder if someone could make it economical enough for local farmers to sell them on the service and also make it a profitable business.

EDIT: Thanks for the research @evansd2 !

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Hmm ok:

Farmers Willing to Spend Money on Crops if Yield Potential, ROI Are Promising.

They claim $28-32 per acre cost to spray corn with conventional methods. We can back into it now, 40 acres per hour, at $28 per acre, that’s $1,120 revenue per hour. Uh… this is starting to look potentially quite profitable.

Three battery packs cover about 15000 acres (warrantied), so total revenue might be around $420,000. That’s looking pretty good for the total drone cost, It’s reasonable that you can buy replacement batteries and get a whole other lifecycle out of the drone before mechanical issues might require replacement… so it’s reasonable to say that you might get 800k revenue out of one drone.
I estimated on the low end of the estimated cost. You might be able to charge a premium because a: you’re fast (I think? how quickly (acres/hour) does a person in a tractor spray corn?) b: you never touch the ground, so no incidental crop damage and losses and c: ??? probably some other advantages.

Anyway, that was an interesting thought experiment. I’m sure I’m completely wrong in the details, but the base math is promising.

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Wow. Thank You! I wonder no more.

Seriously it might be worth looking into it. If someone could partner with the local Co-ops (where farmers buy their peticides, etc.) they might even be able to provide an “in” to selling the service.

I don’t think many (any?) farmer would invest in the equipment and training to do it themselves.

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Conventional cropduster:

How many acres an hour can a crop duster cover?

And the Federal Aviation Administration regulates the aircraft. Each plane holds about 500 gallons of chemicals and it takes the pilot about 45 minutes to empty a tank. One full tank can be used to spray about 100 acres

So on paper a cropduster is faster per acre than one person with a drone. Thing is, it’s much easier to spin up a second drone than it is to spin up a second cropduster. A crew of two people could double the drone throughput, no problem… just divide the fields between them and run both drones simultaneously. You’d see economy of scale with the generator and vehicle costs.

You figure with the overhead of landing the plane, fueling, refilling, flying to and from, the cropduster is probably not that far off from the drone’s 40 acres/hour, and the drone has far fewer operating/maintenance costs than a traditional aircraft.

Also, 500 gallons to do 100 acres seems a lot less efficient than the drone’s application, which is good for operating costs and for the environment. Overspraying is bad in several ways. That’s another competitive advantage.

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It is difficult for farmers to accomplish this on their own as many of the chemicals are regulated and require special licenses to acquire.

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In addition there are significant risks to the pilot and the spotter. I once did some interpreting for a man who owned a crop dusting company in central California. in the mid-70s he was one of the first motorized wheelchairs I’d ever seen - from a a crop dusting accident. His mind was sharp as a tack, but nothing below the neck moved. His company in the Sacramento area made lots of money both dusting/spraying crops and planting rice in the delta area.

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That would be my first thought of the advantage of drones over planes for crop-dusting. I hate to think of the health insurance prices, much less the life insurance. Plus the crop-dusting seems likely to rapidly escalate in ability over time that the one you buy today would be an antique pretty quickly as they eventually got to the point of carrying hundreds of gallons of spray and running on fuel like hydrogen, or even alcohol or gasoline

The square-cube law is not friendly to batteries, though computer control might allow some of those big military-type drones based on airplanes instead of quad copters, thought the costs could go to the sky as well.

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Lab grown Proofgrade™?

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My browser decided to autoupdate and I lost all my open windows. While trying to find the videos, I got captured by this, an explanation of how blue whales became the largest animal ever to live.

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Ok that blue whale video was great. I have always been a bit of a nature geek, and thought I knew my stuff when it came to whales in general, especially blue whales.

Turns out there’s always more to learn, and the way they put things in context was great. A+.

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