- Joined
- Oct 7, 2016
- Messages
- 20
- Reaction score
- 2
- Age
- 125
So, I had watched and was enthusiastic about the Solo's development. But once the price was announced, as a hobby-user, I decided it was out of my affordability range. It was sad to hear about 3DR's exit from the consumer market. However when I saw the BestBuy sale ($399 for drone+gimbal+battery+spare props, what a deal!) I decided to take the plunge.
Hardware quality is impressive and value on purchase is higher than I expected! Software setup was a little rough, forcing me to power cycle components a few times before the firmware updates took, but having built & tuned several home-brew drones in the past I'm really impressed how well it flies, turn-key right out of the box.
So I took it out to a park yesterday, well out of airport range and plenty of open space to fly. Was really conservative on battery-1 and all was fine. Super stable & easy to fly - the first drone I might let a family member fly. In my opinion STOP and the easy-to-use RTH buttons are killer-apps.
For battery-2 I upped the responsiveness to medium & increased max alt. to 400ft. Having gained some confidence, I took it up to 200 ft and flew maybe 1500 feet away. Getting more confident and not able to see the vehicle orientation at that distance, I decided to hit the home button.
The Solo did return to the area, but I noticed it was heading for some trees about 100 yards away in the other direction. I got concerned and hit the STOP button. Am glad I did, the app showed home had shifted over 100 yards into those trees. 10 yards! I landed manually and all is well.
So, I have three questions:
1. How reliable is the GPS RTH feature? Having other drones with GPS, my expectations were low, but having the vehicle 'fly off' over 100 yards wasn't exactly confidence inspiring. This was in a rural area, but was sort of near a dam so perhaps there were power lines were nearby? I didn't see any. Also there was an aircraft passing by at about 1000 ft, at the time, could this have been causing interference?
2. More a note than a question - there's no documentation on how to star/stopt the gopro recording. An oversight? I assumed it started rolling on take-off or something, but when I tried tapping the white circle on-screen to the right while flying I realized I have no idea what that graphic is for but it didn't start recording like I expected. Since then a few searches revealed record start/stop is the totally non-obvious paddle-press.
3. Catching up on 3DR's state of affairs & specifically the Solo last night, i was saddened by the news that apparently (?) features have been stripped in recent software updates, there's an unauthorized 'underground' software development movement forming (android only and I've only got iDevices
). What is the official status on what's going to happen to the Solo's software development? I'm not demanding anything here, but it would be totally awesome if 3DR took the stand of "If you love something set it free" by releasing the full source on GitHub and let the community take over the programming & support task. Go ahead and wash your hands of responsibility, that's fine. Full disclosure - I'm an Unreal Engine developer and Epic's open-sourcing was huge. It earned my eternal loyalty and has only resulted in good things for them. Just sayin'.
Suggestion time:
@chris Anderson, if you're reading this: I understand the business realities your company is in. I'm sure you're tired of your investors ( & their lawyers!) are twisting your balls. It's really sad to see such a great product exit the market. This doesn't have to be a binary decision though.
The major expenses have been incurred. R&D, manufacturing setup, etc must have been costly! But it's a sunk-cost (especially all those custom injection molds - what were you thinking?!!). The way to recover costs is to keep low-volume, low-cost production going with some secret-sauce. If you don't want to do the manufacturing then out-source that and sit back and reap the licensing-cream!
However, I urge you to seriously consider open-sourcing the software. You will only gain kudos & credibility in the community, and this is the secret-sauce that will make the product and therefore your company a success. "IF" this were to become a more community-oriented project with relatively moderate-cost high-quality hardware supplied by 3DR, I think it would grow rapidly & lead to long-term profitable success. I know, I also contribute in a small way to the LibrePilot development effort and there's a lot of good energy in these open-source efforts.
Go ahead and pursue your commercial drone business on your own fork. Even harvest the best of the community's work. IKeep your fork private if you want, although I'd urge you to submit pull-requests to the community edition just to keep the good-will flowing.
Or another path is to charge for software updates. I'd be happy to pay a reasonable fee for tested, supported updates that add the new features I want.
Will this be enough to please your investors? I don't know, maybe not. But my guess is Mr. moneybags would rather get $0.50 on his dollar back instead of $0.25. There's a good ROI argument to be made; maybe not the "J-curve" they were sold on but better than the dreaded "L-curve"!. Plot a course for at least a long-term "U-curve"...
Ok, that's my two cents worth. Batteries are charged, time to go. Sorry if that was too much opinion for a first-post.
Hardware quality is impressive and value on purchase is higher than I expected! Software setup was a little rough, forcing me to power cycle components a few times before the firmware updates took, but having built & tuned several home-brew drones in the past I'm really impressed how well it flies, turn-key right out of the box.
So I took it out to a park yesterday, well out of airport range and plenty of open space to fly. Was really conservative on battery-1 and all was fine. Super stable & easy to fly - the first drone I might let a family member fly. In my opinion STOP and the easy-to-use RTH buttons are killer-apps.
For battery-2 I upped the responsiveness to medium & increased max alt. to 400ft. Having gained some confidence, I took it up to 200 ft and flew maybe 1500 feet away. Getting more confident and not able to see the vehicle orientation at that distance, I decided to hit the home button.
The Solo did return to the area, but I noticed it was heading for some trees about 100 yards away in the other direction. I got concerned and hit the STOP button. Am glad I did, the app showed home had shifted over 100 yards into those trees. 10 yards! I landed manually and all is well.
So, I have three questions:
1. How reliable is the GPS RTH feature? Having other drones with GPS, my expectations were low, but having the vehicle 'fly off' over 100 yards wasn't exactly confidence inspiring. This was in a rural area, but was sort of near a dam so perhaps there were power lines were nearby? I didn't see any. Also there was an aircraft passing by at about 1000 ft, at the time, could this have been causing interference?
2. More a note than a question - there's no documentation on how to star/stopt the gopro recording. An oversight? I assumed it started rolling on take-off or something, but when I tried tapping the white circle on-screen to the right while flying I realized I have no idea what that graphic is for but it didn't start recording like I expected. Since then a few searches revealed record start/stop is the totally non-obvious paddle-press.
3. Catching up on 3DR's state of affairs & specifically the Solo last night, i was saddened by the news that apparently (?) features have been stripped in recent software updates, there's an unauthorized 'underground' software development movement forming (android only and I've only got iDevices
). What is the official status on what's going to happen to the Solo's software development? I'm not demanding anything here, but it would be totally awesome if 3DR took the stand of "If you love something set it free" by releasing the full source on GitHub and let the community take over the programming & support task. Go ahead and wash your hands of responsibility, that's fine. Full disclosure - I'm an Unreal Engine developer and Epic's open-sourcing was huge. It earned my eternal loyalty and has only resulted in good things for them. Just sayin'.Suggestion time:
@chris Anderson, if you're reading this: I understand the business realities your company is in. I'm sure you're tired of your investors ( & their lawyers!) are twisting your balls. It's really sad to see such a great product exit the market. This doesn't have to be a binary decision though.
The major expenses have been incurred. R&D, manufacturing setup, etc must have been costly! But it's a sunk-cost (especially all those custom injection molds - what were you thinking?!!). The way to recover costs is to keep low-volume, low-cost production going with some secret-sauce. If you don't want to do the manufacturing then out-source that and sit back and reap the licensing-cream!
However, I urge you to seriously consider open-sourcing the software. You will only gain kudos & credibility in the community, and this is the secret-sauce that will make the product and therefore your company a success. "IF" this were to become a more community-oriented project with relatively moderate-cost high-quality hardware supplied by 3DR, I think it would grow rapidly & lead to long-term profitable success. I know, I also contribute in a small way to the LibrePilot development effort and there's a lot of good energy in these open-source efforts.
Go ahead and pursue your commercial drone business on your own fork. Even harvest the best of the community's work. IKeep your fork private if you want, although I'd urge you to submit pull-requests to the community edition just to keep the good-will flowing.
Or another path is to charge for software updates. I'd be happy to pay a reasonable fee for tested, supported updates that add the new features I want.
Will this be enough to please your investors? I don't know, maybe not. But my guess is Mr. moneybags would rather get $0.50 on his dollar back instead of $0.25. There's a good ROI argument to be made; maybe not the "J-curve" they were sold on but better than the dreaded "L-curve"!. Plot a course for at least a long-term "U-curve"...
Ok, that's my two cents worth. Batteries are charged, time to go. Sorry if that was too much opinion for a first-post.
