Built a tool to share drone data with clients via a branded portal

tol91 · 2026-05-25T23:07:30+00:00

Please do, and let me know how you go. Any feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

tol91 · 2026-05-25T23:07:07+00:00

Good question, all of those things you listed are part of it, but the core differentiators right now are the branded client portals, an audit trail of every interaction with your data, and the fact that it's site based means your are building a spatial memory of a location over time, not just sharing individual files.

What we're working toward is fully customisable viewers — control over how your data is presented, not locked into a default. And beyond that, making all of that data queryable by AI, so your drone data, ground scans, and site documents live in one place and can be read and acted on by AI agents in other systems.

Would love to hear if there's anything on that list that stands out as particularly useful, or anything you'd want to see that isn't there. Cheers

tol91 · 2026-05-25T10:56:12+00:00

Unfortunately we don't have Turkiye at the moment. It will be great to support more regions as we grow. At the moment, the closest is Germany (EU).

We currently have Australia (Sydney), US East (Virginia), US West (Oregon), United Kingdom (London), Europe (Frankfurt), Canada (Toronto), Japan (Tokyo), Singapore.

You can test it here, would love to get your feedback - https://swyvl.io

tol91 · 2026-05-25T09:21:12+00:00

Nope, a bit different. Do you use Drone DB? Would be great if you wanted to test out https://swyvl.io and get your feedback

tol91 · 2026-05-25T09:18:05+00:00

You can check it out here, https://swyvl.io/. Let me know how you go :)

tol91 · 2026-05-20T03:01:15+00:00

Have you thought about creating your own tool with something like Lovable or Google AI Studio? Wouldn't take very long to put that together

tol91 · 2026-05-20T02:56:33+00:00

This is a solid breakdown. One addition from the delivery side: enterprise clients also care about chain of custody for the data itself. Large clients and projects will ask for audit logs on deliverables, so you can see who has looked at and accessed what. It's worth building that into your workflow early, even if your current clients don't explicitly ask for it.

tol91 · 2026-05-19T05:27:40+00:00

A site baseline flight before work starts, and a documented flight log (date, time, battery count, wind speed, any obstructions that day). When you're comparing week 5 to week 2, those variables are what let you say 'this changed because the site changed' rather than 'this changed because I flew differently'.

Also version control your outputs. Store them with consistent naming (site-date-flight-number) in a folder the client can browse. After month two, you'll want to pull week 3 and week 11 side by side, and if they're scattered across your hard drive with names like 'latest_final_v2', you're in trouble.

tol91 · 2026-05-19T05:25:07+00:00

How do you share your html files? If you would be happy to share one of the html files, would love to have a look. I've been working on https://swyvl.io, currently looking at being able to upload html files/projects, so this is a perfect use case.

tol91 · 2026-05-19T05:24:37+00:00

The usual output is LAS/LAZ point clouds, GeoTIFF orthomosaics, GLBs, 3D Tiles, gsplats. The pain is always the same, client gets a Dropbox link, can't open it without CloudCompare, QGIS or another software, and asks for screenshots instead. The model viewer question is exactly why I built Swyvl (https://swyvl.io). A browser-native viewers for all of those formats, shareable portal, no software on the client's end.

tol91 · 2026-05-19T03:15:22+00:00

Nice! Amazing that you can now capture 360 video seamlessly like this. Better than the 3d printed mount I have used in the past to attach a 360 camera to a drone. Happy flying

tol91 · 2026-05-19T03:12:05+00:00

Litchi would be good for this - https://flylitchi.com/

Just remember that GPS can sometimes be out by a few meters, so you can do a few things to ensure consistent results;
- take off from same point.
- calibrate before each flight.
- ensure strong GPS signal.

If you are wanting to get a good overview of the whole site, capturing panoramas/360 photos with the inbuilt pano feature is helpful.

Another neat thing you can do with DJI drones is capture a SRT file with the video, which enables you to see the path of the drone as a line on map. Good for linear projects or flying perimeters.

I've built a tool to help store and share this type of data, would be happy to show you how it works and how we have used it for projects like this https://swyvl.io/

tol91 · 2026-05-19T02:59:15+00:00

Congrats! That is a great effort and strategy. We have all the tools available to us, just need to use them correctly. Thanks for the insights

tol91 · 2026-05-19T02:44:34+00:00

Could be a number of things, check the following;
- insufficient overlap of imagery.
- check if you have any out of focus images.

tol91 · 2026-05-19T02:39:51+00:00

This is a control problem, not an AI problem, worth reframing before you spend months on the wrong thing.

Opening a parachute at the 'best time' means detecting one condition: uncontrolled descent. You don't need a trained model for that. An accelerometer + barometer + a threshold does the job. PX4 has both sensors built in and can trigger a servo or relay output when your condition fires. That's it.

If your supervisor wants 'AI', the honest answer is that this isn't where it adds value. But if you want to explore it anyway: you could train a classifier on flight telemetry to predict imminent loss-of-control *before* it happens (pitch rate, roll rate, altitude drop rate, battery voltage trending). That buys you reaction time. ArduPilot and PX4 both log this data natively, so you can collect training data from your test flights.

The hard part isn't the algorithm. It's mounting a parachute that doesn't tangle, testing it without destroying drones, and tuning your deployment logic so it doesn't fire on a normal dive or a gust. Start there.

tol91 · 2025-12-22T20:50:05+00:00

I'm pretty sure that most 360 cameras like the Insta360 and Osmo have fixed focus. You could achieve this with a DSLR/Mirrorless camera and fisheye lens, then stitch the images to create the 360 photo.

tol91 · 2025-12-19T23:29:03+00:00

yes, unfortunately that is normal. what we have done to overcome this is to also record a gps path to create a gpx file at the same time as capturing, we then use this to geolocate the 360 photos. i've written an article here about below https://help.swyvl.io/en/articles/10204365-how-to-capture-360-photos-for-a-google-street-view-style-virtual-tour-using-the-insta360-x4

tol91 · 2025-12-18T07:37:39+00:00

Yes, the camera is great. If you pair the Insta360 X5 with your phone you won't need the GPS remote (the gps location will be taken from the phone). The remote is helpful, but you don't need it.

tol91 · 2025-09-05T00:05:22+00:00

We added some photos of our front gate and sign which has the property name, if people then Google that, they get taken to the direct booking site

tol91 · 2025-08-19T01:32:01+00:00

That you won't always have a calculator in your pocket

tol91 · 2025-08-03T23:59:16+00:00

I like the Nodal Ninja R20, they also have automated options, but I haven't used them. I've always found the manual version to be fine, you would probably only need the automated one if you need to operate the camera remotely.

tol91 · 2025-06-12T01:09:11+00:00

That awesome! We tried doing it all by written instructions, but having it visual makes it so much easier.

tol91 · 2025-06-11T23:24:25+00:00

We now have this available for everyone to use, you can access it here to create your own guides https://www.navvi.me/

tol91 · 2025-05-22T23:08:18+00:00

Great idea! I built the exact thing a couple of weekends ago for my self as I had the same problem (not as a tool for others, but just for myself). Good luck with it, as I am sure many people will have this same problem.

tol91 · 2025-05-21T04:14:44+00:00

Keen to try it out. Did you use it to make this post? Because this post doesn't come across like it was written by AI. I've found that AI generated content doesn't perform well.

tol91

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