GWN Technologies - MERIT Training Drones & Mapping with QGIS

Preface   I have worked on many international GIS projects starting around 25 years ago. We have come a long way since the only source of spatial data was LANDSAT and satellite images coupled with NTS mapping. I have worked in Africa in cities with over populations of 150 thousand with no updated road maps and with only two locations where one could access the internet via satellite and that was in 2007. Today we have updated high resolution imagery in Google Maps and many good sources of street maps including Open Street Maps which is in the public domain. Google imagery is proprietary and may not be the most current. Consequently there is still a need for updated imagery, especially in emerging and developing countries where updated satellite imagery is less available. In the mid 80s IBM PC revolutionized personal computing and Microsoft (MS) managed to dominate the market. Unfortunately licensing requirements and the proliferation of pirated software in emerging and develop...

  DJI Mini 2 SE /4K Mapping Tutorial Low cost drone mapping approach DJI no longer provides SDK tools with their lower cost general purpose drones like the DJI mini series. This means that users will have to use the DJI Fly application to control their drones. Android and iOS apps like Litchi, DroneLink, Map Pilot Pro, etc. cannot directly control the low cost DJI drones like the mini 4K with their apps.  This makes mapping with their low end drones more difficult. However it is still possible with some work arounds. You can use your DJI drone for mapping by followint the YouTube's "Turn your DJI Drone into a mapping machine for free!" video tutorial by Dylan Gorman. You will need to create a default kmz file on the DJI Fly app and manually overwrite that with your mapping kmz file created with the Map Pilot Pro (Maps Made Easy) app of the mission you want to complete. Note: the limitation also holds for this approach because DJI does not work with the kmz files for their...