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posted by CoolHand on Wednesday May 27 2015, @03:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the spying-at-home dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday May 27 2015, @09:19PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Wednesday May 27 2015, @09:19PM (#188785) Journal

    That occurred to me, but it seemed battery life would be a significant limiting factor, and solar panels sticking out of a planter box to power them would be, it seems, a dead giveaway to the GPS/RFID tracker. On the other hand, if there were something whose battery could last a week or two with the tracker chirping once every 15 minutes, that could work. I could bury it in the mulch and no one would be the wiser. Do you know of brands/models/specs that might fill the bill?

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by middlemen on Thursday May 28 2015, @12:47AM

    by middlemen (504) on Thursday May 28 2015, @12:47AM (#188891) Homepage

    Sorry I don't know something that has a good battery life but you should pose this question on reddit in the appropriate subreddit for RFID and GPS and other tracking devices. There you will find folks who specialize in these things and give you suggestions that are good for your problem. Maybe just avoid the mulch story and just say you need to track inventory that is being transported and see how they respond.

    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday May 28 2015, @02:59AM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday May 28 2015, @02:59AM (#188921) Journal

      Thanks for the suggestion, I'll do that. I'll be interested to see what they say; I've experimented with location awareness in mobile apps and the GPS can be quite inaccurate, bouncing around as much as 100 yards. That's a big difference in a place with this kind of population density, meaning the GPS could bounce between the Catholic Church on the corner and the DayCare center up the block, when the true location is the dodgy house in between.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.