Hi,
I have received the following email from 3DRobotics last night, my Iris quadocopter was already in France, at Fedex office for a delivery at home on monday. 3DRobotics say they cancel my order and will refund me, rhis mean they will ask Fedex to send back to product to the US, why such a decision for all customers ? Why cancelling a shipement when the parcel is nearly at your home ?
Here is the email I have received from 3DR
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Thanks for your order with 3DR. We're writing to let you know that, due to a temporary change in our shipping policies, we're unable to ship orders outside of the US and Canada. We'll be cancelling and refunding your order immediately. We're very sorry for the inconvenience, and we'll let you know when we can resume shipments to your country.
If you have any questions or would like to make modifications to your order, write to us at help@3drobotics.com or call our support line at +1 (858) 225-1414, Monday through Friday, 8 am to 5 pm PST.
Sincerely,
The 3DR Team
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Replies
In a logical world (don't we all wish), the export restriction doesn't make any sense.
The APM electronic boards are shipped without the APM firmware on purpose. Meaning they are just simple PCB's with some electronics and sensors found in many devices all over the world, including a couple of billion smartphones.
It is the APM firmware that turns the pile of electronics into a working autopilot. At the moment APM is hosted on github using rackspace services. Meaning that depending on how rackspace operate and use server load balancing, the data may or may not be served from distributed servers all over the world. So the internet and especially open source in general is incompatible with any export restriction just by how it operates.
The actual data/source code that makes up the APM firmware is very much international. The project maintainer and number one contributor Andrew Tridgell is Australian.
There are also previous cases where export restrictions have been tried applied to open source and failed. Take a look at for example PGP. And this was for cryptographic software which is/was a very sensitive topic with regard to exports. As a result the PGP case pretty much broke any reason to have export restrictions on crypto.
Further more. Many, many consumer devices today including any smartphone, GPS handheld unit and even some children toys have all that is needed to become an autopilot. On top of that, most of the components used in modern devices aren't even designed or manufactured in the US. APM is currently being ported to Linux, and there is no reason why it could no be made to run on a Android based Smartphones also. So unless the US want's to export restrict any electronics that can be turned into an autopilot, the case is lost before it even began.
How about a production facility in Germany? You would be close to the birthplace of the Pixhawk ...
Like Klaus said before - we would welcome you :)
OT: No, don't do that! Only "bratwurst mit sauerkraut"! ;-)
:)
Somehow, it's this guy's fault:
:p
Paul
Did you know even monkeys use tools?
????
(referring to what this guy is doing in the posted video above)
If it means some sensible shipping costs in the future, a little downtime for international shipments won't hurt me (but the distributors are gonna feel some pain).
Anything is better than the *flat rate* $38 I get charged for *any* item from 3DR. $1.50 DF13 cable? $38 shipping. $1,500 full specced X8? $38.
What a silly circus! The problem, notwithstanding paranoid fantasies, is now visible as being nothing more than maybe a self-inflicted stubbed toe followed by the utter failure of plain old public relations. Probably the reflection of a character and/or skill-set deficiency on the part of a single person, perhaps an investor/engineer who does not understand mammals, high up on the totem pole of this tiny, charming, but amateurish corporation. Even in the extremely unlikely event that there was some legitimate reason to not divulge details of this temporary constipation, a skillful spokesperson could have soothed this thread into oblivion 19 pages (two tubs of popcorn) ago.
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