Mark finished the initial release of his program!

Palentier is here! After months of hard work my boyfriend, Mark Willis, has finally finished the initial release of his muse-inspired open source program: Palentier! As seen in his DIYDRONES post, Palentier is a program that leverages the latest in UAS robotics technology for real-world applications.

Named after the scrying ball Sauron in LOTR used to watch as 'one who sees from afar' over virtually any part of the world, Palentier translates photographs and telemetry info collected from UAS into data that real-world mapping systems, like Google Earth and ArcGIS, can use.

This initial release is only the beginning of what is sure to be a useful program with many field applications. Currently, we are testing it to cut down the number of manual hours (and hours and hours ad infinitum ad nauseam) required to get pictures taken via aerial photography into a usable format for photogrammetry  for map and model making. Our initial application is SAVING THE WORLD!!!! Well, okay, that's a bit dramatic - but we are trying to preserve data from archaeological sites, creating maps and models of those sites, to eventually build a fully interactive global representation of cultures and civilizations to record earth's history and be able to view it, as it was, at any given point in time. So...we *are* trying to save the world...digitally.

Should you find this program, Palentier, useful, please remember that it has taken many hours of "free time" to develop and test in order to get it "off the ground"...er...so to speak. ;) Feel free to download, try it out, and please, please, please - DONATE! :)