Ok guys, with all the people waiting on APM2 and all the exciting new alpha and beta releases of APM firmware coming, I think many people are starting to chomp at their bits, a little.
To that end, I've opened up this discussion for all those with complaints. As I've joined the Dev Team, and not at a productive stage yet, I'll monitor this discussion, and relay things to the others on the Dev Team.
These could be both hardware or software, or just general rants and raves!
Hope everyone takes advantage of this! Maybe we'll all learn some things in the process.
Just wanted to add this response from Chris Anderson:
Please just contact sales@3drobotics.com and inquire about the status of your order. They are not necessarily shipped in order. For example, the unsoldered ones are shipped first, because they're faster to put together. Then soldered with GPS, then soldered without GPS (or maybe those two in reverse order, I can't remember). There are approximately 50 going out each day and the team tells me that the backlog should be over by Mon/Tues of next week.
I agree, please use this discussion for Rants and Raves. Order issues should be directed to 3DR directly. I think you will get better response there.
Replies
Hi Ellison,
This is more of an observation and a suggestion rather than a complaint and it's not directed at you but rather those responsible for getting the APM2 into production and marketing it. So here you go:
I'll bet a lot of people are really upset that they sold their APM 1 thinking they were going to get the APM 2 in some reasonable timeframe. Today, I was just told that I shouldn't expect my APM 2 before mid/end of February. I paid for the APM 2.0 on December 16 so if I do get one by end of February thats about a 10 week lead time. So, I knew (sort of - I was told mid January when I ordered) what I was getting into and I'm not irate but I am disappointed. What I find interesting is the OpenPilot people have the same problems - not enough supply to meet demand. Their product is also very low priced and in high demand and... they are trying to make production happen on a shoestring budget following "open" and noble "non-profit" principles. There are a lot of parallels.
I have over 25 years in the hi-tech design, prototyping, manufacturing, and marketing and have seen more that a few products come and go and have been able to analyze why many products fail. Folks may say, "commercial principals don't apply to non-profit/open source endeavors" and they'd be right as long as there is no competition (i.e. choice) and all customers are infinitely patent and all the supporting vendors will work for free. Unfortunately, that's not the real world.
For ArduPilot to survive, as measured by retaining a critical mass of supporters and contributors, it must be attractive relative to other offerings - that includes commercial as well as other Open Source products (I'm thinking the new OpenPilot upcoming product and some others). If competing products are more available with similar features at a price users can afford they may flock to those products (as modulated by price and features) and revenue will suffer for the products having problems (i.e. APM2).
I am a BIG ArduPilot fan and APM2 is VERY exciting!. While APM1 is rather dated and clunky by comparison to both APM2 and the upcoming OpenPilot product it's still very cool and has life left - for now. However, have you noticed there are a lot of APM1's for sale? I have. I've picked up a number of them for really good prices. The poor guys selling them thought they'd be getting an APM2 soon so decided to sell their APM1 right away before the value went down too much. The problem is APM2 is just not available except to a very small number of people and most of the people I bought from are still waiting.
So, what kind of behavior does the lack of availability drive? Well, first, given that many of us already dished out $200 just to be on a waiting list and even though some of us would like to have another board for a second project, few are willing to pay up front for a second board with such long and nebulous delivery times. Second, many are reluctant to buy the existing product because it's clearly obsolete now (we used to call announcing a replacement product before it's in volume production "Osborning" - this concept seems to have been forgotten!). This reduces demand for current product and reduces revenues for those selling this stuff which makes it even more difficult to get the new product into production because they have less income. Third, it can scare new users away and towards something that IS available (or has a better sales pitch). All this not only reduces revenues but it also reduces the flow of new, creative brains working on the open source hardware/software and puts the project at risk.
So, what are the solutions? Well, the laws of supply and demand still apply - if supply is low and demand is high then higher prices can be charged and, up to a point, the product demand will be minimally affected. Even if demand goes down somewhat, there is a point where revenues are higher even though fewer orders are taken. I know I was VERY surprised that APM2 is $100 cheaper than APM1. I would have expected it to cost at least the same - at least until it had been in production for awhile. Because it's such an improvement I would have gladly paid that price IF I knew I could get it in some reasonable timeframe - like a couple of weeks max. Making it cheap offers zero benefit if you can't get the darn thing!
You are probably saying, "Heresy! That's not what open source is all about!!". Well, actually it is. If you can get the open source product in to more people's hands quicker by charging a bit more up front so you can get it into production more rapidly and then lower the price later. We all benefit as the product get's to more users more quicklyly which leads to more innovation and more satisfied users who otherwise would be twiddling their thumbs or defected to a different, more available solution. In an open source environment there will be a difference as to how the money get's used. Instead of funding some start-up employees stock options the additional money can be applied directly to increasing/improving production capability. This money can go towards manufacturing houses that can do higher volume, etc. etc. We get more boards available more quickly and more users adding innovation and being happy campers.
The length of the lead times and slips we are experiencing on APM2 will most definitely negatively impact the excitement and innovation around APM2. Those without boards have little/no interest in diving in to APM2 yet and, if one of the competitors becomes available there will be defectors.
We do have a lot of wonderful stuff in DIYDrones already. I appreciate the effort by Chris et. al.
But you know, there are some stuff which can improve it further. For example polls. Being completely new to RC/Quad, I wished if I had seen quad configurations people use. The recent blog post from Chris about cheap quad setup is really nice for newbies like me. Wouldn't it be wonderful, If we had few polls about, what are the most common setups, Frames, ESCs, Props, Motors, etc..
If NING does not provide the above functionality, there are workarounds too. For example, we can provide a google form (of a spreadsheet) inside a blog post, to capture data from each participating member and populate a spreadsheet.. However, as I've seen in NING forums, adding google forms needs to be done by a moderator (iframe).
I would love to hear what others think on this.
regards,
Japi
I wish the search would sort by date!. The information get outdated really quickly. Unfortunately, when we search something, we get mixed results. Hope NING would fix that soon. I don't think it is really a complicated fix, unless they are doing something on indexing. I have seen couple of people complain about that in the NING forums.
How about an official email to people awaiting pre-orders so we actually know whats going on.
I personally hate reading 80 pages of rumors to find out its all BS anyway when i call in.
Chris here with a couple quick responses:
1) DIY Drones is hosted on the Ning platform. It has the features Ning provides, no more or less. I can't create some new forum technology or "fix search". As Ning upgrades the platform, we all benefit, which happens quite frequently (although sometimes their upgrades are worse, as in the case of the HTML 5 chat, which broke the site until I disabled it). But there is no point in asking me to add or change the technology itself, since I don't control that. And please don't ask me to switch to some other platform, which would be an unbelievable amount of work.
2) We are always looking for more Moderators, who can help steer discussion and delete inappropriate stuff. We have about 50 moderators now, but only half of them are active. Please PM me if you'd like to join that group. Ning will soon be adding icons so that people will be able to publicly see who is a moderator and who isn't.
3) Part of being an open source project is that we encourage as much as possible to happen in the open. That means everything from suggestions and praise to complaints. The upside of that is that the project is very transparent, and the pressure of having our problems aired in public keeps us honest and attentive. The downside is that it's a bit chaotic and potentially scary to newcomers. In practice, this is mostly just an issue during new product/software releases, where there are inevitably some teething pains. After that, complaints and issue reports tend to fade back behind the more interesting and encouraging discussion that usually dominates this site.
3) As Ellison notes, there is a proper process for filing issue reports: the Issue Tracker. The developers do pay attention to that, and there is a formal process by which Issues are evaluated and responses are generated. People should really use that more.
Hey Gareth, tell me more about this "over unity" power generation.
Yeah, I find the "threading" confusing to. Especially, when a e-mail notification comes in and the reply was under my comment, but I have to hunt around to find it. And I never use @ and # here since it's not parsed, so there's no point.
Ok, here's a new rant. I really don't like this forum structure. For a number of reasons:
1. The search doesn't work. I can search for words that I KNOW have been written, and the search doesn't find them. Why?
2. Too many places to post. We have blogs, and you can post. We have the forums where you can post. Then there are the user groups, where you can post messages to the user groups. Then within those user groups, there are more forums! This makes it that much harder to find things, or for people to know WHERE to talk about something.
3. The replies are not inline. This makes it impossible to follow a thread. If somebody asks a question early on, and the thread gets really big, sometimes people will post a response to the question, and nobody will see it because it's 30 pages back.
I think this is a great idea, we all need to let off steam now and then. So long as it doesn't bring down the guys who are putting in their time and effort to make this thing be the best it can be.
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