Hurricane Milton post #12: You don’t need a drone, just a pole and a phone!

A day or two after Hurricane Milton tore its way through town, someone posted on the local Facebook groups offering their services to fly a drone over your house to check for roof damage — for $75.00.

You can also do what I did and get roughly the same effect for FREE with your smartphone and a long pole or board, as pictured in this post.

I write mobile apps for fun, and I keep a couple of old Android phones handy, as they have all sorts of uses, such as hurricane FM radios (I’ll write about this in a later post) and cameras that I don’t feel too bad about putting at risk.

So I took one of my old Androids — a Moto x4, which was a great mid-range phone that offered a lot of bang for the buck back in 2017 — and securely taped it to a long slat from a the renovation project from when we moved in. I knew it would come in handy someday.

You might be tempted to use duct tape, but I figured that for a half-hour’s use, the annoyance of having to peel it off the phone wasn’t worth it. I used masking tape from the spot in our utility closet that I call the “attach things to other things shelf” (if you don’t have one, you might want to establish one).

Tape it in a way so that you can use the controls on your phone’s “camera” app, set it to video, start recording, and raise the pole! You can extend the viewing angle and reach by standing on a ladder.

Here’s a sample from my recordings: