If you’re thinking about Skynet, stop, this is a whole other company. Real, growing, successful and not determined to end mankind. Skycatch was founded in 2013 and has been using Node.js since the very beginning.
What do they do?
The company specialises in drones that make surveying properties a lot easier and cheaper. They build commercial drone data solutions for various fields, including construction, energy or mining. The drones (built by Skycatch) record all the information of the site you want to survey and then give you the data in an accessible form.
Where do they use Node.js?
The short answer is everywhere.
Node.js is a main technology for them, they use it for their drones and back end development and data processing.
Their main task is to look at certain sites and create a database with all the information that the drone records on that location.
For data processing they use a lot of microservices that work together. Node.js is in their own words the “glue” that keeps everything together. The drones are quite attractive, but the main point of the company is data processing. They have Node.js on the drones (Edison board) on their API site and also almost their entire backend is made in Node.js. The general advantage of being able to move very easily from the frontend to the backend is greatly appreciated at Skycatch.
The fact that Node.js scales easily is also being taken advantaged of, as their work process is not limited to one section. Their developers have the freedom to move throughout the whole production line as needed and because it’s all JavaScript they can do that.
This is a whole other way to use drones in a practical and commercial way, as helper tools. Going beyond their perception of toys or weapons, this role brings more lucrative results and Skycatch is at the forefront of that.
Their drones can record and process images from a site and turn them into a 3D model in a few hours. The same task, done the old fashioned way, would take a week or more, depending on the size of the site.
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