Solo Gimbal update...
http://3drobotics.com/solo-gimbal-update/
Basically a bunch of drivel with a guy posing in deep thought wishing he would have applied at a different company wondering. Also wondering if his stock options are going to be only worth the toilet paper they are printed on... I read this twice thinking what a bunch of BS that only the serious cool aid drinkers would buy.
I thought I would give it a "truth in marketing" spin on it.
. Aug | by Roger | Life After Gravity, News | 0 comments:
For this
post spin, we want to let you inside 3DR by providing a look into the
overall lack of management process for a product like the gimbal. In the past we’ve focused mostly on technical
matters failures, so we hope this is an interesting change of pace.
To
cut to the chase set up the stage for our reasons you will have to wait longer: we were not happy with the performance of our gimbal over the past month (neither are the paying customers waiting for it) while we’ve been tuning performance.
(We crapped our pants on bad this pile is). So we decided to make it better
(than a Walkera G2D), which means starting production this week (first week of August), not in late
July May as we last promised. This was a tough decision, to be sure
(because the investors and customers we conned out of their money are PO'd)– this post explains our
logic excuses.
So, first things first. The gimbal performance we were seeing
wasn’t bad was crap. In fact, we were right in that gray area where we could have reasonably decided to
ship it right now (unfinished and untested like the Solo but we were afraid of the return rate). Our user tests on “
naive users” "idiots" – people that haven’t seen much aerial video
(School for the Deaf and Blind) – were uniformly positive. But with a trained eye,
(anyone with eyesight) you could see movement in yaw in
windy any conditions.
So, we had a decision to make. Ship the gimbal as-is
(like we did the Solo), or
make it better bite the bullet and get yelled at.
We Our investors decided
we better make some changes to make our gimbal work great
(or better than a hard mount), even if it meant
taking a little longer pissing off our customers to do so.
Decisions Screw-ups like this are always challenging because they aren’t black and white. At 3DR, one of our guiding principles is to prioritize the
user investor's experience (UX) over schedule over cost. We write it this way, as system of inequalities:
UX > schedule > cost
(Basically we are going to baffle you with BS by coming up with this amazing formula)
If you ever come to 3DR
(We will kindly escort you to the door and get a restraining order), you’re likely to see this little equation on whiteboards, in notebooks, in our internal docs and on the bathroom walls.
(and a whole host of other stupid BS formulas as we wonder the halls)
We know perfection is
impossible not going to happen with this brain trust. Nothing we will do is ever going to be
perfect even sub par. It’s hard to even write that sentence
( keeping a straight face), because at 3DR , we strive for absolute perfection. Sounds pretty hokey, right?
( UH YEAH! considering our track record) But that’s really the way we work.
And while we know we may not achieve
perfection a working gimbal , there is some difficult-to-define point where the team can say, “That looks good. I’d put my name on that. Let’s ship it.
”( especially after the Solo, Nobody will ever make that mistake again.) (Beware marketing lingo ahead ->)[MARKETING BS] Not all companies have enough synchrony across engineering, design, ops, marketing and every other team such that the whole group hits that point at about the same time. At 3DR, we do have that synchrony. And we just weren’t feeling like the system was ready to go
.[/MARKETING BS]
So specifically, what weren’t we happy with in the gimbal performance?
(short answer.. everything. Long answer ahead..)
Over the past month, we’ve been
tuning prying, bending and welding
the performance to get the gimbals to
stabilize well not flop around like a can on a string across the unavoidable variance
of the manufacturing process of a bad design. In so doing, we pushed our software control system really hard.
(Basically we held the Software engineer's feet to the fire and told them to fix the inherent mechanical problems that were plaguing this POS)
At some point in that tuning process, we
got were ordered to get together
(sweating bullets and worried about our jobs) to try and understand how
much more performancewe could cover our bad design
we could get to fix it purely out of software.
Taking a step backRealizing our failure: in any hardware/software product, whether it’s a thermostat, fitness tracker,
paper bag or drone,
BS Alert->there’s an interplay between hardware and software engineering.
(I swear I heard this line is a Demi Moore movie) The hardware sets the bounds of what software can do.
(and since we realized we screwed up when we designed this thing) Software can move fast to
improve cover things but cannot operate outside the basic design of the hardware
(Those Jackasses in the software dept can't patch up our screwup). Hardware is slower to develop
(because we don't know what we are doing), but can open up new territory for software performance and features
(Software guys are laughing at us now).
(Next part is where they actually admit they screwed up when they designed it)
In our case, the weight (or lack thereof) of the top part of the gimbal compared to the bottom part taxed our yaw motor’s ability to correct for disturbances in yaw.
(We screwed up and didn't realize that when rotating around an axis, both sides should be equal weight) Basically, when the copter and gimbal get hit by wind or other disturbances
(flatulence), your video
might will look like it is vibrating or drifting from left to right. There’s a lot of technical detail here that I will omit
( because I can't BS my way though it to make it sound believable), but our decision boiled down to: leave performance as-is
(crappy for a $50 gimbal yet alone a $450 one), or find a way – a way that would add time to the schedule (back to the drawing board), no doubt – to address the
yaw wandering failure to understand even the basics on how to build a gimbal.
We did find a way. Adding
mass lead tire weight to the ends of the
spider bracket – the piece that holds the dampers on the gimbal at the very top of the assembly – the thingy on top increases the overall mass of the top part of the gimbal. This allows the yaw motor to react to and correct disturbances hitting the bottom part of the gimbal where the camera
lives is hanging by a thread, resulting in more stable video.
(basically balance the axis of the gimbal so the motors don't have to overhead and squeal. )
This improvement is relatively straightforward
(DUH) to implement in mass production (as much as anything is straightforward to implement in mass production), so we decided to
go for itwhat the hell, unemployment pays up to 99 weeks (after, of course,
designing and testing the improvementtaking an ass chewing for screwing it up in the first place).
It wasn’t an easy call
(literally I was called every name in the book and then some!). We know we could work on the gimbal forever
(as proven) and it would get better each day
(we told the top brass). We set strict requirements
(it has to be better than the hard mount) and checklists
(shirt, check... shoes, check.. service.. hmm maybe )during our
product development process guessing how to make these things and to make that process as efficient and objective as possible
(cheap because with all of the returns we are running low on funds) . But at the end of the day, it boils down to a
subjective, qualitative, ineffable judgment call us keeping our jobs– “That looks good. I’d put my name on that. Let’s ship it.”
(famously said that last engineer when launching the Solo, who now lives down by the river in a van.)
We
are very eagerhave to get this gimbal out to you! Solo’s not complete without it (DUH)
. And we know not to let
perfectnot working be the enemy of the good. Actually, that’s not quite right – good isn’t good enough
(because we haven't even achieved that yet). I’ll rephrase: we know not to let perfect be the enemy of the great.
(yeah yeah that's the ticket)
So that’s where we stand
(short). We
made some changes did a major redesign and started
(over with) production. We’ll
(doubtfully) check our product thoroughly before we ship the units. Fixing yaw wandering is only part of the story (believe me! this thing was DOA!) – there is so much more work that has gone into the gimbal (and is going into the gimbal, and will continue
(and continue.. and continue)to go into the gimbal via software
updates) patches that I don’t have room to describe here
(because I don't understand it).
But the
decision demand to improve the product and take the
schedule hitass chewing vs. shipping as-is
(like we wanted to if the software guys would just go along) seems to me to be the most
interesting scary thing to share with you all. We hope we’re painting a clear enough picture
(we are incompetent) – perhaps with this
(mis) information, you could even imagine yourself here (suffering) at 3DR,
(NOT)doing this work, and making these
(lack luster)decisions.
The
plandemand is to ship gimbals mid-month (or next year.. whenever). We are doing more
testing patching in the next week and will be able to officially speak to dates at the end of this week or beginning of the one following
(or the following or the following).. Thanks for your support and patience.
(not that you have any choice) We’re continuing to work hard on your behalf
(to stop the returns).
Finally, most important, here is some video that does not include any of the recent
tuning patching, but has a version of the latest
hardware failure. This was shot by one of the 3DR team, Jon.
(that has been let go) Link to youtube here.
.
