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John Dickow: [00:00:00] Hello, we're back with another episode of your drone questions answered. I'm John with the drone launch Academy here to find the answers to your drone questions. Today's question is a good one. It's what are some recommended apps for recreational or commercial drone pilots? This person is used before you fly thinking about using a drone deploy, but what else is out there?

So today I have with me, David young founder of drone launch Academy David, thanks for being back with me here

David Young: today. What's up, John. Always good to be back on the pod. so, good question, everybody loves some good apps, you sent me this question, I thought about it, I put it into four different categories, I think I have about eleven apps, so what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna run through them, talk about each one, I've personally used all of these but maybe two that I just found that I just thought I'd mention for reference, so let's dive in.

first category, I'll tell you the four categories, I categorize them into flight automation, flight planning, which is like seeing airspace and some other like before you take off stuff. Insurance and editing, right? So flight automation, those are apps that are going to control your drone for you, help you fly your drone, help you get different shots, things like that.

So the first one I want to mention is an app called Litchi. We've talked about it before on [00:01:00] this podcast, great tool for both commercial and, recreational. It allows you to basically program your drone on the computer or on your phone where you want it to fly, where you want the camera to point, when you want it to take a picture.

You can basically automate all the movements of your drone. on an app and then you basically you hit a button, it loads it to your drone and your drone takes off and does that stuff. So people use this a lot if they want to get, let's say, the same exact video every time or the same exact photo from the same exact angle every time.

So this is used a lot in, progression photos for construction sites. Let's say you want to capture the same sunrise every morning for 30 days. You know, you could program one specific shot and you just take your drone, hit, hit a button and every day we get that exact same shot. So you're trying to do something like that.

Lychee is good. you can use it. It's a on Android and, Apple. It does cost a little bit of money. I think it's somewhere around 20 bucks, but it's a one time payment. It's Lychee. Next is drone link. This one's a little bit more expensive. They have, recreational, I guess, pricing and then they have commercial pricing, but this, think about litchi, but on [00:02:00] steroids, you can do a ton of different stuff.

You can do inspection, You can automate the drone to fly up the side of a building and go back and forth, taking pictures on the way up to get the condition of a building. you can do mapping, collect mapping work for us. So photogrammetry, if you're familiar with that, the listeners, maybe you are, maybe you're not, Essentially, you can take tons of photos and then they all get stitched together later in other software, to create giant maps or 3D models.

So this software allows you to do that. Actually, the next three pieces of software allow you to do that. So there's Drone Link, Drone Deploy, and Pix4D Capture. Drone Deploy is a little bit more of a comprehensive software, but the free piece they have is the flight automation. So, each of these pieces of software will allow you to, get overlapping photos to help you to create.

lifelike models, whether it's like 2D sort of maps that are used for construction, surveying, civil engineering, that kind of stuff, or a 3D model of a building. Sometimes people use this software to take pictures of stuff, create a 3D model, and then they'll run it through a 3D printer, print out like an object that they've captured with their drone and stuff like that.

So, that can be pretty cool. So those, pieces of [00:03:00] software are called DroneLink, DroneDeploy, P 40 capture. one reason to use Drone Link is that with DroneDeploy and P 40 Capture, they're only compatible with certain drones. Drone Link is usually compatible with more drones. It's just the way that the software controls the drone is a little bit differently.

So if you have like a DJI, you know, Mavic Air two, it's a popular drone. typically you get drone like, because that doesn't work. With DroneDeploy or Pix4D, technically it works with DroneDeploy, but you have to pay a lot of money for it to get it to work, and all DroneDeploy is doing is using DroneLink integrated into their software, so you might as well just code your drone.

And then the last one I'm going to talk about is a software called DJI pilot. So that's a software by DJI to get a flight automation controls the drone that's typically for like their enterprise large drones, Matrice and, um, 30 series drones. So if you're recreational, not so much, but if you have a, bigger, drone or enterprise drone from DJI, that's probably what you're going to be using instead of the others. let's go flight planning now. So flight planning, what I mean is before you ever take your drone off You want to do some checks, you want to see what is in the air above me because you never know if you are in an airport or if you're in [00:04:00] restricted airspace or controlled airspace.

So there are some apps that make that easy for you. Technically there's the before you fly app that the FAA puts out, but they put that up in partnership with another company called Aloft. I would just use Aloft's regular app. if you go to Aloft, A L O F T dot A I. you can go to their website, but they also have a mobile app.

it's very user friendly. You can pick which rules you're flying under. So if you're flying under commercial or you're just flying under recreational rules and it shows you, if you can or can't fly somewhere. So it shows you if there's an airport nearby that you would need to get access, you know, request permission or, you know, most places around the U S are open and clear, but it's good to check.

So I would look at that one. if we're talking weather or winds, a lot of times people underestimate the impact of wind in their flights. A good one is UAV forecast. They have a nice app. It shows you what the winds are like at different altitudes. You guys don't know much about the weather. The higher you go up, typically the stronger the wind, because there's not much getting in the way of it, you know, so it may not seem too bad down where you're standing, but you fly up 300 feet and it's like 25 mile an hour winds, you know, so, that's a [00:05:00] good app to sort of look at winds to look at.

That's called winds aloft is the aviation term. Look at wind, look at visibility because there's visibility requirements. If you're flying a drone, you need to see for three miles. Obviously, you can walk outside and get a pretty good idea of how far you can see, but you can just verify it there.

and some other kind of, weather related things. The only other one I want to mention there, I haven't used this one, but as I was just looking around a little bit to see if there was any new things that I had missed. Some app called drone assist flight planning, to be honest, it looks similar to like.

A loft, but, if you wanted to use that, you can't, that's that.

John Dickow: Do any of those costs money when it comes to flight planning?

David Young: No, those are all free. They have paid versions. You can use them for free though. A lot of it makes money from enterprises, like putting their fleets on there and getting kind of like more robust, drone management features, you may be forecast that you have a paid version where you can get more detailed data or save stuff, things like that.

But. they have free versions. as far as insurance goes, a lot of people ask about drone insurance. I love Skywatch, it's a company called Skywatch, skywatch. ai is their, website. but if you go there to app [00:06:00] Skywatch, you can, get on demand. So if you're doing like a job, this is more on the commercial side, you're doing a job and they require you to have liability insurance.

So if you crash your drone and you hit a car or you damage a house or something like that, right? Um, yeah. you can get a liability, insurance policy for 000, 000, whatever it is that you need. Typically, you know, you'd want at least several hundred thousand and up, just for the time of your flight.

So I could say, Hey, I just want it for one hour and I'm only going to fly in this little zone here. And you can see where that is. They have their own little risk factors, and so you maybe only would pay 15 bucks or something like that to get a million dollar liability policy for that one hour. if you're flying infrequently, you don't have to have like a full, insurance, policy to cover you.

Now if you're doing flying all the time, it's probably cheaper to get a full insurance policy. But, the Skywatch AI app, what I like about it is that you can technically fly your drone through that app. And it gives you like a safe driver score. It looks at how, safely you're piloting the drone.

And then as your safety and consistency go up, your risk score goes down with them. And you can actually qualify for cheaper insurance. So that was [00:07:00] an interesting thing. So, but you do have to like. Log into their system and fly through their app. it's similar to like the DJI app. So that's an interesting, app to look for there.

but they're probably the best at the user friendliness of the drone insurance experience then the last category, this isn't really drone apps, but I was just thinking of other apps people might use. you're doing more like cinematic footage or you're taking photos or whatever, CapCut is a very popular video editor, for mobile.

And again, I'm specifically just talking about like mobile devices and like iPads or whatever, but CapCut. has gotten a lot more powerful, I feel like, and it's pretty good. I mean, it's hard to, trying to edit with your fingers is never super fun in my experience, but if you are going to do it, it's, it's got a pretty good, user experience and they, they improve that a lot.

So CapCut DJI has their own version called light cut. I've used this one a long time ago, but I don't have a lot of experience with it, but I do know that they have that if you wanted to check it out. and then the only other thing I would say is if you have photos, I know, Lightroom for Adobe, I believe they have a mobile app.

I typically use desktop version. but if you want to edit photos on there, you can do that as well. [00:08:00] Also, I don't know if people know this. I'm, I'm guessing they do, if you're taking pictures on your drone and they, go to your phone, you just edit photos. And the photo app too, on like an iPhone, I'm sure you can do it on Android too, just hit edit and it gives you a lot of access to like brightness and hue and saturation, all that stuff.

So none of those powerful editor, but there it's, it exists. But yeah, that would be my rundown of the apps.

John Dickow: I'm really looking at these three categories, flight automation, flight planning and insurance as being something that's just applies to everybody, commercial drone pilots, recreational drone pilots.

So that's fantastic. Thank you very much for, for sharing those and I'm sure it's a broad market. There's a lot out there. And so, Things are always

David Young: kind of new things are being added. And so

John Dickow: always kind of checking in on this kind of thing. This is probably a pretty good idea, a pretty good topic to check in

David Young: on every so often.

if you're listening to this and you're like, Oh, I can't believe he didn't mention this one, email us sport at drone launch academy. com. We'd love to hear it. And we'll add it to our list next time we, we run down. Absolutely. Well,

John Dickow: thanks David. I appreciate you taking the time, to run through these and it's always a pleasure having you on.

If you have a drone question, we will find the answer to it. You can [00:09:00] actually go to ydqa. io, type in your drone question there.

We'll see it. We'll find someone who can answer, or if you're part of the drone launch connect community, go ahead and type it in there. We'll see it. Find someone who can answer until then we'll see in the sky.