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
I've been wanting to experiment with one of the 3DRobotics Optical Flow Sensors.
I put my name on the email notification list so that I would know when they were back in stock.
Got the back in stock email today at 4:00 pst.
Tried to order one today at 5:30 cst, and got the out of stock message.
Did they sell out that fast?
Very frustrating...
:-(
Ive got a complaint...... when we call 3DR they lie to me about shipping and whats really going on. Can you explain that? I was clam cool and collected until I just hungup the phone (ordered Dec 6th.) I called 3DR to inquire about the status (I was told my apm2chip would ship today) and in a single conversation I was told the following.
1. We have it packaged and shipping today
2. You might not make the batch that gets sent out today.
3. Notes are saying we will ship them Monday but that might change
4. I was suppose to be in another shipment but missed it (what does this mean? I ordered back early DEC)
5. They only made 30 to ship out...... thought they were making 100 a day?
After mumbling and sounding very confused she started explaining to me how many people already have them and they were shipped in early Nov. I didn't call about what the status of other APM2's are.... im glad others have them that wont get my airplane in the sky. the numbers above don't match up..... how do you explain that other than UN-organization on 3dr's side?
How about some kind of real update as to what the heck is going on at 3dr...... ??? are we actually going to get APM2's? or is this just some kind of large sick joke. ive about had it with being told 300 diff stories and reading rumors someone with authority needs to step up and clarify some information.
im fine with waiting ..... just tell us some information that is real enough of the smoke n mirrors and blaming everyone else at some point you need to step up and take accountability for your actions even if you were put in a shitty situation by a vendor. (Still no official word to your users that inquired about some kind of compensation.)
Just my asshole opinion.
KP
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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