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Welcome back to Geek Time, this is Brad. Hi lulu

Hi Brad.

So we're gonna continue on talking about drones, we're gonna start with homemade drones, I mentioned that…

You were designing…

…I design on, I have the body for it all like printed out, but I also was getting a bunch of the components necessary to actually program it and fly it.

Every time I talk to you, I just feel like you're getting even deeper into a geekdom.

Well, I mean I did go to school for electronics engineering, so this is kind of like one of those things that connects with that.

I know from an outsider’s point of view making your own drone, wow, but like yourself, is that something that's super impressive or is it something that people do engage in?

It's quite common, especially like we talked about RC planes and cars, you can go to the stores and you can buy an RC car or you can build one, right? They have like different, you can put different motors in them, you can have different suspension, you can design your like the car on your own using all the components, so they have kits that you can use to build a drone, or you can just go by like the DJI, I think that's what you bought for your father?

Yes, 大疆, yeah.

So you can buy one that's already fully assembled or you can buy a kit or you can just buy components and build one on your own.

Yeah, but if you buy it from大疆, then how is that homemade?

Well, like you can buy like the motors, you…

Oh, you buy parts.

You can buy all the components and put them all together. There you have to have like a brain which is like the micro controller, it helps with the program, then you have to have like something to tell it where like the GPS for example, have to have a GPS chip, you just get a bunch of chips together and you program them to work in unison and you can get programs and then like tailor the programs to your own shooting. But basically just put everything together and you can fly it, you can use like a phone app to pilot your plane or you can make your own remote control.

Remote control…

But like the one of the great things about a lot of the drones nowadays is you can have like first person point of view goggles.

Oh, goggles that you wear over your eyes and then it's like what you're seeing is what the drone is seeing. That is pretty cool. It's like talking about experiencing the life of a bird you know just flying, that sounds great. But let me ask why would people make their own drones, I would imagine that's just a hobby.

Well, it is a hobby, I mean that the same thing like RC cars. Anything that people do on their free time can be their hobby.

Yeah, they have those clubs now, the drone clubs.

They have racing clubs, flying clubs, they have like people build it, they can do stunts and things like that. They have obstacle courses to put their drones through. They also have drone fighting.

那不是很费无人机吗？So drone fighting, wouldn’t that destroy your drone, then you have to get new one or built new one.

Basically it can, but like it's one of those things where people are like people who build them are like… you know most of the components, like if you the motor itself isn’t going to break, the propeller might break, like a few of the body parts might break, but the most important parts they're probably not going to break. They're pretty sturdy, so you go and you fly them, you run them into each other and the one that's not strong enough will fall.

WOW, so really, when you say fight, you do mean just like crash into each other fight.

Like there's what is it, a kite fighting right, when you have like the kites that are trying to knock each other out of the sky it's the same thing.

For those of you who watched big bang series you should remember one episode, they really got into kite fighting.

So nerdy…

Yeah.

So wonderfully nerdy.

To go even a little bit deeper something that a few people are doing is people are designing their own vehicles using these quadcopters or octocopters, they're building like hoverboards and things like that.

Hoverboard? You mean like it hovers in the air and people can stand on it. It's like a in the air skateboard.

Essentially yeah, the one that I have seen the guy has, I think done about ten fifteen feet into the air, but usually he doesn't go much further than like 5 feet into the air.

I think it's quite risky, it’s quite dangerous. So in the future, shall we expect a lot of people using their drone hoverboard and just like flying in the air doing stunts?

I don't think you'll see too much of it until they become a little bit safer, but you'll probably see a lot of people like designing their own types of things like this. But I think it's probably 10, 15 years off before you start seeing a lot more of that.

Um…but I guess in our lifetime that's very likely. So far we have talked about including the basic episode we were talking about how it is used by the military, police and also now by hobbyists, are there any other uses like, for example, for the greater goods of humanity.

You can use drones in disaster relief and like animal protection. So like if there is an earthquake and some of the area is difficult for people to go through because it's not safe, you can send a drone through and find…

Oh, to can look for survivors.

Yeah, you can look for survivors, you can use it to like if there's a bridge, if the bridge is not safe, you can use the drone to hover around the bridge and like take pictures of certain areas to find out if there's any structural, integrity problems or structural weakness. You can kind of go to that area to fix it. But you can use drones and a lot of that when it comes to disaster relief, but you can also use it to have like a swarm. And you can have like WIFI signal spread out over an area.

Hang on a minute, so first of all, what is a swarm? S-W-A-R-M.

It's kind of like a swarm of bees, you have all these bees. They create like a network, so you have them flying in the sky, they can be solar powered, so they can kind of just like stay up in the air for long periods of time. But basically what you can do is you can create like a WIFI network over an area that just been hit that may not have signal but they can still pick up like WIFI signal from people's phones who might be stuck because phones might have power for a day or two after the earthquake…

The signal towers are gone…

Yes, the signal towers are gone, but you can deploy a swarm over an area, you can connect to the signals, you can send messages.

That does sound like it's very useful, and obviously, it's used for sort of like just general scouting monitoring what is going on, right?

Yeah, they are also used in like animal protection when you look at like what is it when you're talking about helping animals who are…

Conservation?

Yes, conservations or preserves, there’s a lot of poachers who go in and try to kill the animals and take their like their tusks, their teeth or their horn. You can have drones that fly through the air that specifically look for particular shapes, you know, human shapes and they can send back a signal to the police in the area.

Yeah, I mean with drones you probably can just try to detect infrared signals and all that…

There’s a lot of applications of it, which reminds me in the future, since we were talking about how it will develop in the future. You know probably a couple of decades ago when you were watching sci-Fi film or cartoons, you see all these flying cars, could drones be the beginning of flying cars because they are a vehicle.

Yeah, when it comes to like the flying car, the main issue is this they're probably never going to be allowed especially in bigger cities because if flying car crashes, it's gonna cost a lot more destruction than if two cars have a crash. They might lean more towards doing like drone taxies where you have like a quadcopter or like you know a larger quadcopter that can pick up one or two people and bring them over like a predetermined path in a city kind of where you have like a pickup point. Like you tell it I want to go to this drop off point and they kind of just go between these places.

Because nowadays already there are cities they are trying to test or experiment with driverless buses. I think this is what you probably are talking about in the future. We might not allow people to just drive or …I mean the whole point of drones are they aren’t manned, so there won't be any drivers I guess it's predetermined roots like you said so that they won't be any …that eliminates all the dangers and the risks. It also dawns on me that maybe you can have ambulance drones?

Yeah, you could, they have an idea where you kind of have a stretcher and you put your patient or the person who's injured on a stretch, and the quadcopter basically picks up the stretcher and brings them directly to the hospital that way they don't get stuck in traffic or anything like that if it's an emergency where they could be flown through the air safely, there’s something like that.

A lot of times they would have for long distance probably have to use a helicopter, but for more shorter distances in a city where you have like maybe1or 2 kilometers between a person and the hospital that can take a long time if you're going through traffic, but if you can go directly there over everything, then it's much more quicker and safer.

Yeah, even though when you mentioned the words swarm earlier on, it kind of freaked me out to imagine all of these drones in air, but thinking about all these positive applications help better life of the general public, there a lot of things to look forward to.

I would say so, I don't think we have to be afraid of drones, I think it's more about just we have to be afraid of kind of like the individuals who are using them.

Same as with a lot of technologies, all right, and that ends our advanced episode about drones. If you have a drone or thinking about getting a drone leave us a comment in the comment section, tell us what you think. Thank you Brad for coming to the show.

No problem .Have a good day.

We'll see you next time.

Bye, everybody.