There isn't a self proclaimed nerd out there who isn't excited about drones. They are unmanned, autonomous (yet remotely operated) and capture (and transmit) imagery.
This video out of Ukraine shows a Russian drone made by taping together commodity commercial (non military spec) components.
The world is rather divided about using "jugaad" in times of war. The global military industrial complex is designed around selling countries extremely overpriced hardware that is very reliable, and has spare parts available for decades.
Here you see a small PCB controlling a Canon DSLR. Every time Canon changes its DSLR model (external dimensions, control buttons, etc) the chassis and electronics of the drone would have to be redone. But, this drone likely has a BOM cost of $2,000, while surveillance drones used by western countries likely cost upwards of $100,000.
Given that you lose no strategic information during a war if one of your drones crashes and is captured, how does it matter if you are using $2K or $100K hardware. In fact, you could use a lot more $2K drones and afford to lose many more of them, than if you used precious $100K hardware.
This is really also the strategy the cloud uses. Instead of running critical transactions on a large mainframe with a centralised highly available database, transactions are distributed across multiple servers and services. This drastic reduction in server cost is really what has fueled the tech explosion we see today (not that the current proliferation of apps is a good thing).
What do you think? Is it clever or just stupid?
This video out of Ukraine shows a Russian drone made by taping together commodity commercial (non military spec) components.
The world is rather divided about using "jugaad" in times of war. The global military industrial complex is designed around selling countries extremely overpriced hardware that is very reliable, and has spare parts available for decades.
Here you see a small PCB controlling a Canon DSLR. Every time Canon changes its DSLR model (external dimensions, control buttons, etc) the chassis and electronics of the drone would have to be redone. But, this drone likely has a BOM cost of $2,000, while surveillance drones used by western countries likely cost upwards of $100,000.
Given that you lose no strategic information during a war if one of your drones crashes and is captured, how does it matter if you are using $2K or $100K hardware. In fact, you could use a lot more $2K drones and afford to lose many more of them, than if you used precious $100K hardware.
This is really also the strategy the cloud uses. Instead of running critical transactions on a large mainframe with a centralised highly available database, transactions are distributed across multiple servers and services. This drastic reduction in server cost is really what has fueled the tech explosion we see today (not that the current proliferation of apps is a good thing).
What do you think? Is it clever or just stupid?