User:Rufus

Hi, I'm Chris Gough and I hail from from Canberra, Australia. Thank you for visiting my page here.

I'm a software developer by trade, but I work as a manager for the Australian Government (Dept. of Environment). Among other things, my interest in Paparazzi is as a nice technical challenge to keep me sane after reading/writing documents and going to meetings all day.

I've not yet had any flights with paparazzi. I have acquired an EasyStar and had lots of practice - to the point where I can now launch/land reliably in adverse conditions, such as the tree-lined ridge across the road from my house. I also just finished assembling a "Boomerang 40" aileron trainer and converting it to electric power (~800W), and I intend to learn to fly that competently before using it (or something similar) as a UAV platform after the EasyStar .

I have a TWOG from CheBuzz, a pair of 2.4 Mhz zigbee modems and some 36MHz radio gear. With the help of this page I seem to have my modems to working :). I plan to do AUTO1 and AUTO2 flights with the EasyStar by the end of the month (September 2009) or early October.

Longer term (hopefully by the end of Summer), I'd like to build a UAV that routinely patrols/surveys a moderately large area (farm) taking geo-referenced digital photographs, and develop a ground-based post-processing facility to stitch/authorectify/etc them to maintain raster layers in a geodatabase... Machine learning is a bit of a hobby of mine, and I entertain the fantasy of eventually one day building an automated kangaroo/cow/plant detector.

I know a friendly farmer who will let me fly over their 300 Acre paddock, home to 90 cows (and probably as many kangaroos). I've started the process of learning what I have to do to make my surveys there safe and legal, and expect to have the necessary approvals in place by Christmas.

But for now, my "UAV" is a rather odd looking small cardboard box with a USB socket, a (power) switch and some IR sensors on a coreflute stalk.