Inspired by an incident at the dog park

[ritaxis]

What is the actual difference between a drone and a remote-control device?

At the dog park I saw a couple with a flying object a bit over a foot in every dimension, which had four rotors (horizontal blades) and a payload that looked like a video camera. They were controlling it with a rig that one of them was wearing which looked like it had a video camera on it also. I didn't know what to call the thing and this raised this question.

I didn't go talk to them because I had the dog with me (dog park, right?) and it seemed like more than I could handle to get their attention and talk to them.

Meanwhile, barbie pink laptop just got turned into a brick by a short in its cord and I'm borrowing this slow Windows 8 machine while I'm shopping for the laptop of my dreams. My prejudices have been confirmed. I want a windows 7 machine, with CPU of 2.7 GHz or more, a small, textured touchpad, a smallish laptop-style keyboard without all the redundancies, a gamer's dedicated graphics card (I have lists of what will work for my needs), and not a wide screen. Also its fan shouldn't be loud and weird and get louder and weirder when I press the shift and tab keys. Seriously, that sounds frightening. Also what is this function called that keeps zooming in and out on the screen when you're trying to line up the cursor you can do things? I want to turn it off and maybe not even have it on my new laptop. I think I know how it's supposed to work but I can only get it to work properly on purpose a quarter of the time so I keep having to simply accept giant text and having to scroll to see it. Like, just now I seem to have temporarily fixed the zoom by accident after having tried to do ikt on purpose for several minutes.

Tomorrow K and I both go to work at the polls. He's an inspector at the University and I'm electronics voting specialist at my neighborhood voting center (which generally has either two or three precincts at it).  So today I intend to cook us food to take with, and also go to bed early.

Comments

[19-crows.livejournal.com]

I recently asked someone that question about drone vs. RC device and was told that a drone is usually controlled from further away, maybe much further away. An RC device is run by someone standing where they can see it.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

I was afraid that was all it was.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

I've seen a device with four rotors called a "quadrotor".

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

They're starting to use those mini-helicopter four rotor things to film news reports. They can be a problem and here in the UK there has been at least one incident where the presence of TV crews with these devices delayed the landing of the air ambulance.

Drones are not actually new. They've used radio controlled aircraft for many years at an airfield not far from here for the RAF to use as target practice. They operated out at sea and, as 19_crows said, were controlled from much further away. Also they were the size of a small aircraft. Of course radio-controlled air craft of various types are not new either, but the division between them seems to be becoming blurred.