By popular demand, those cool t-shirts and hoodies that the DIY Drones team wore to Maker Faire are now available in the store. They're black, but we'll be offering other colors in the future.

The t-shirt (…

Holy crap. DARPA has just announced a project to use the DIY Drones model for the future of military UAVs. Called UAVForge, which is already up and running (although it crashes Firefox on my machine), it is described in the…

Good clear explanation of the power side of a brushless motor control and how to build one here. Stay tuned there for a second post on the processor/code side. …

Maker Faire was awesome. More than 100,000 people attended over two days, and it felt like almost all of them came by the DIY Drones booth! We had 12 team members manning the booth, and it took all of us to handle the crowds, which were usually two or three deep. Our cool t-shirts and hoodies were as popular as our…

Speaking of Chinese companies selling open source hardware for half price, Multicopter News reports that HobbyKing is preparing to sell the…

From the Google Earth blog:

When discussing the new …

We love our beta testers. They help us find bugs, fix them and test all those variations of hardware and configuration that no single dev team could test themselves. Much of the sucess of APM, ArduCopter and all the other DIY Drones projects is due to a large and incredibly supportive group of beta testers.

But…

Designing a robot that can traverse variable terrain usually involves a number of unsatisfactory compromises. You can go with a flying robot, which will almost never get…

Great fun. The Sparkfun team did a terrific job of giving a flavor of this competition, from the thrill of victory to the agony of defeat, and all the crazy crashes inbetween.

It's full of DIY Drones team members, too, with Doug and Jason highlighted. Lots of great shots of Doug's catapult. The post is…

Very cool: The New York Times was at the Sparkfun competition and did a story on DIY Drones!

It will take me a while to live this quote down ;-) "“This is the future of aviation,”…

I hinted that the DIY Drones team had been working…

More coolness from the Vicon motion capture room at ETH Zurich:

From IEEE Spectrum:

The…

Oh, to have a half-million-dollar Vicon motion capture system. Look at what you can do with it (in the lab)!

From IEEE Spectrum:

"The University of Pennsylvania's GRASP Lab, famous for those crazy quadrotors that can …

If anyone's going to Google's I/O conference this week in San Francisco, make sure to check out the "Cloud Robotics" session on Wed. You might see something interesting from the DIY Drones dev team ;-)

 …

On the occasion of the first beta release of ArduCopter 2, I wanted to take a moment and talk about the teamwork that was required to get to this milestone.



There are many quadcopter projects out there, some of them excellent. But…

I'm delighted to announce that APM 2 is now out of beta! The current version is 2.1, and is both available in the downloads section of the code repository (for those who want to play with the code), or can just be…