I chair the tech and garden committees at the PTA at my kids' elementary school in Brooklyn, a small, Title 1 (the majority of the families are poor) school with limited resources. A couple months ago the PTA gave money for expensive self-watering planter boxes, flowers, hoses, and other gardening implements to improve the austere, institutional exterior, which resembles a prison. As we discovered this morning, some of the flowers, boxes, and hoses were stolen over Memorial Day weekend.
Since planter boxes must be outside, and the thief must be in the neighborhood to know the boxes are there, it occurred to me that they must be visible from the air and perhaps a camera drone with decent range could be used to recover the stolen property and put a stop to thefts that will surely continue if we merely replace what was lost.
Ideally I imagine flying it from the flat roof of my 4-story apartment building to search in a .5 mile to 1 mile radius, with roughly 30 minutes of flying time and a "go home" feature if it loses contact with the controller or runs too low on battery.
Are there drone aficionados in the SN community who can speak to the feasibility of such a project and/or can recommend models to buy?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2015, @05:56PM
Unless you clarify if you are paying for that drone yourself, one might assume that you used this event to convince someone with a budget to buy a drone so you could play.
How about using that money to purchase non expensive, non self watering planter boxes. Manual labor to water the plants perhaps? Or even a committee to organize students to take turn watering the plants? That could even translate into teaching the students a thing or two; how things grow, the rewarding aspects of honest work...
Perhaps you could even use some of the time you were planning on flying that drone to water the plants yourself.
Technology is not always the right approach.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Wednesday May 27 2015, @11:03PM
So you're saying he could use the drone to water the plants?