Long time ago, when WebODM was still in its infancy, Windows was still my (Piero’s) primary development platform. As such, the very first versions of WebODM used to run natively on Windows, without docker. But as time went on, with docker entering the development/release process, Windows compatibility was placed aside and focus was shifted on getting docker to work less painfully on Windows (spoiler, it’s still painful). Despite knowing that in theory WebODM could work natively on Windows , I […]

WebODM introduced support for plant health algorithms about a month ago. It was no secret that we concurrently started work to support TIFFs file inputs and multispectral cameras, both features that have been highly requested. Today we are excited to announce the release of ODM 0.9.8! TIFF Support Up until now ODM was able to process only JPG files. With this release we added support for processing TIFF files, both 8bit and 16bit. TIFF is a popular format especially with […]

Drone mapping has been the focus of my work for the past few years. For 2020 I’m planning to increase this focus with the development of DroneDB, which I have hopes will replace the (clunky) workflows around aerial data management. For this reason I’ve adopted a new name for all drone tech related business activities (and hopefully put an end on the “how do you spell Masserano?”). Say hello to UAV4GEO. Website: https://uav4geo.com

Prediction: VR will take-off within 10 years.

During this past summer, the OpenDroneMap team has been active on a number of fronts. Split-Merge Improvements While this feature has been announced months ago, we’ve been working on a number of improvements to make it more stable and fast. The distributed split-merge workflow in particular is non-trivial and has required a number of fixes to improve its reliability over time. The LocalRemoteExecutor (LRE) module is perhaps one of the most interesting modules in the codebase, allowing submodels to be […]

On August 8th 2016, almost three years ago, the WebODM project was started. The goal was to bring a friendly user interface to OpenDroneMap, which at the time worked only via command line and had a bare-bone UI via NodeODM which lacked things like user authentication, map previews, 3D model display, etc. Yesterday I merged the entwine branch which upgrades the 3D model display to support EPT and the new features of Potree 1.6. The release is mostly symbolical, as […]

Correction from 10/9/2019: I thought the patent had expired this year, due to the confusion on the Priority Date vs. Filing Date. The patent is still in effect, and is set to expire March of 2020. As of March 7th of next year, the SIFT patent will expire in the U.S. U.S. patents are valid for 20 years from the earliest filing date, but can be extended to 21 years if a Priority Date is used, and SIFT (US6711293B1) was […]

Great article about ODM. We REALLY need to start translating / localizing the software in other languages.

The Free Rider Problem applies to free and open source software really well. If you’re a maintainer, read it up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem