My Project's Sample Mission

I have made a sample flight mission where my drone will be monitoring activities on a certain point of interest. In this case, a mango tree located within a rice field not too far from our house. For example, this tree is where thousands of Eurasian Tree Sparrows or locally known as "batingol" sleep.

I know these birds because last year, dozens of these together with a bunch of muynas and a couple of  zebra doves(palekpek) used to hunt for small insects that dwells on grasses, maybe it's the food they fave so much because they risk getting near to a lot of potential predators in the area like cats, dogs, humans.  But eventually, they left for some other places because my cats drove them away. The cats never succeeded in catching at least one the birds even if they used their lion-like hunting skills because the batingols are so paranoid, that they fly away once they sense danger or threats even if the cats are still far away, sometimes the cats would pretend sleeping so that it can get as near as possible to its prey but its efforts still ends in failure.   

 I am interested which creatures gets attracted by this early evening phenomenon when these birds start to arrive and find its favorite location to get through the night. These birds chirp and when thousands of them chirp, it gets too noisy and I am interested which predators gets attracted by this noise.

From the picture above, the start/landing point is a few meters away from the point of interest . The flight path is composed of 2 patterns, elliptical and a circular pattern. The purpose of the elliptical path is to scan the presence of creatures near the area while the birds are busy chirping while the circular pattern should detect the predators that are already attracted and planning an attack by observing the activities of the birds.

The flight altitude is about 50m and flight time should be at least 10 mins, one in the late afternoon when the birds are arriving and may be 2 hours after just when all the birds have arrived but still not able to settle yet.  

In real life however, this type of activity which happens in the early evening would not be quite possible with the DJI Mavic Mini because it has no attachment option for thermal camera. But it would still be possible if I would have to customized again by developing a diy thermal camera, design the attachment and do some firmware programming myself . But this would entail more efforts and more expenses which could easily deplete my funds, so for now this type of application will be included in the succeeding upgrades.   

Until now, I have not given any name to my project but I would soon work on that because there is so much work to do. So for now and maybe I would call it "My Project".