I was asked this once at an informal interview and didn't have an immediate answer. I told a story about the time I was trying to debug RF signals and the ultimate cause was that there was another remote using the same hardware ID. It was extremely unprobabel, but it turned out to be the cause. Since then I've had more time to reflect on how I would answer that question if I was asked again. The weirdest bugs I've ever dealt with all have a common theme, distributed systems. In my last two st

Showing off our truck on a nice, sunny afternoon. Shot with a Phantom 3 Pro and an Inspire 1.

I am excited to announce that I have accepted a new position with HUVRDATA . After an eight week transition I am thrilled to get started. I wI'll be their CTO and will guide them into becoming the leader in drone based inspections. It was surprisingly hard to leave Eagle Eye and specifically, let the team know what was next for me. I lost sleep over this decision but we were able to make it through. I loved working with them and it was filled with great memories. I've been working with Bob a

Improving takes time and patience and lots of near-misses. There is usually a narrow window in to capture the ideal scene and if you aren't in position and ready you will miss it. I continue to be 10 minutes late, out of battery or space on the SD card when I realize this is the shot I wanted. In this case, I wanted to try the waters before going again the next day. The challenges of shooting downtime is that you attract too much attention to play around with expensive equipment as a crowd ga

Pushing the distance out a little further and keeping it low across the water. Experimenting with Final Cut Pro X to get the titles and transition.

I had a terrific time with @LSRiverboats getting this footage. This was captured in 4k@30fps but rendered to 720p for Vimeo. The initial shot was digitally zoomed in and the reset is right off the camera. Some minor exposure correction was done in post to make every match. This was a lot of fun but extremely challenging to operate from a boat. There were two boats, fading daylight, bats and other groups to contend with. Thankfully everything worked out and I am happy with the results.

I've been trying for quite some time to get this shot. It was interesting because this was also my longest distance flight. I only went 1000ft' up the river away and it took a lot of squinting to keep it in sight.

This was taken out front of the Austin City Power Plant and is using the new manual camera controls of the Phantom 3 Pro. It is hard to go back to past locations and try to get a fresh take. The challenge is to that you are no longer looking at it with fresh eyes. This is made worse if you liked the results from previous tries. I am challenging myself to throw away my previous work. All locations (except the Capital) are fair game. I am also going to not get hung up on having done the shot b

This is video from my first flight with the new Phantom 3 Pro. I picked it up earlier today and ran it through its paces. So far, it is a significant improvement from the Phantom 2 Vision +. The iOS app is the major differentiator. All the other features are in support of the app. The remote is the same as the Inspire 1 and feels much more refined. Common features can be done using hard buttons and there is less time spent pawing at the app. I am a big fan of physical buttons and not havi

This is an older video that I hadn't posted yet. It is from a couple months ago and has nothing to do with the rest of the post. I had a crash earlier in the week that has destroyed my Phantom 2. Almost immediately after take it it lost all power and unceremoniously fell from the sky. My first reaction was shock. I don't know if the battery wasn't seated all the way or it experienced a different malfunction. After some time to think, my shock turned to gratitude. Gratitude that this wasn't

The goal was to make a short compilation from several different shots. I wanted something visually interesting without spending hours on each shot. This was all done on just one battery. Except for the last shot, we only took one pass at each shot and didn't review anything. I had several more shots in mind, but will save those for another compilation. I enjoying improvising and the preasure of just starting the camera.

This is a composite image from several individual shots. It was taken a peaceful Sunday morning just after sunrise. I really enjoy Sunday mornings photo shoots. Austin is still recovering from its collective hangover, the roads are empty, and the sun isn't scorching hot, yet. There is something more challenging about get a sunrise picture. Sunsets are easy, I can tell how the sunset will turn out on my drive home. There is a very little risk that the weather will change between packing up s

I'm starting to make progress with my ariel photography. The images and video are making me cringe less. I'm starting very basic and working up slowly. Instead of just cranking up fancy effects in LightRoom or adding some razzle-dazzle from Final Cut Pro. Right now it is about making something that works well as Desktop wallpaper. This blog is the new starting point for a gallery. The goal is more about progress instead of a store of available prints. (That's not to stay I won't sell out

One of the great advantages to sharing your beginner work is that you are able to see rapid progress. The initial learning curve is usually pretty quick. Making a Vimeo and YouTube channel and posting to reddit provide quick feedback. A lot of the feedback will be critical of what you are doing, but this is all part of learning. Once you reach a certain level of achievement you reach a plateau and growth levels off. This is usually a key area of attrition. The funnel tightens and many peop

I'm trying out a new hobby, that has been a casual interest of mine. This year is going to be the year of GoPro photography. It is a kind of weird idea, but the idea is really simple. I've bought the Hero 4 Black so there isn't a better model I can blame for my shortcomings. There is also a wide enough group of users posting their content that I have a significant yard stick to compare myself to. What have I learned so far? I've learned that it is easy to have an opinion about what looks g

I had the opportunity to speak at the Austin Python meetup again. This is my presentation on how we use Python at Eagle Eye Networks. I love speaking at these events and really appreciate all of the participation. Here is the video Here is my presentation

We recently added Japanese support to our webapp. When implementing it, we decided on the most straight-forward method of converting it at run-time by adding a helper method to the view. The first step was to extend Backbone.View to include a translate method (abbreviated as 't' to reduce noise in the template). It performs a simple dictionary lookup. It falls back to English if a suitable translation can not be found. BaseView = Backbone.View.extend({ t: function(str, skip) {

I had a lot of fun speaking at the Austin Python Meetup. My presentation was on the current options available to those who want use python with embedded hardware. It was a great group of people and I got the chance to bring some toys. Presentation is here