"399€ is the price of a GoPro alone, and here you've got a 1.2Kg quad, big battery, gimbal, remote, trackers and camera for the same price. The price is just incredible!
Has anyone an idea on what explains this? Are all non-chinese consumer drone…"

"Absolutely real. There is a long interview of the team by ClubIc (in French) here:
http://www.clubic.com/mag/transports/article-803216-1-francky-zapat...

In brief: 4 microjets under the board delivering a total of 1000HP, plus two small (electric)…"

"@greg You are spot on about engineering compromises. Another example is that we could remove the safety grids and have longer flight time, but that would become a finger cutter :-)
As for the slow speed, this is in fact not really due to the form…"

"@rob The wind resistance is impacted by a phenomenon called the 'ram drag' effect, and not so much the form drag. This ram drag makes it difficult to have large tilt angles. It can however be solved by careful design, in particular on the CG…"

"@coby Thank you very much for your support and nice words! In terms of efficiency (thrust/watt), the duct clearly improves things compared to a propeller alone, if the duct lip and propeller shape is optimized, this compensate for the added weight…"

"Thanks Bill. We use a hybrid architecture:  the autopilot and all system critical work is running on a separate cortex m4, which means that the operating system can freeze and the drone keeps on flying (and gently lands if it realize the cpu is…"

"Thanks all for the encouraging feedback !
@killerovsky
There have been many designs posted in the past here, I assume some of them are based on arducopter, multiwii, etc. In our case this is a 100% inhouse control, written with a model-based-design…"

"I'm not sure about your use case, but why not use a small embedded linux and a MIPI camera board directly ? You can easily find MIPI boards with M12 lens holders. Raspberry PI2 is capable of H264 encoding a 30fps 1080p stream."

"Thanks John !"

"@superwallon You are correct, the ducted fan concept with control vanes is actually quite old and used in many devices (especially military). Our invention relates to the fully shielded aspect and technical/mechanical details on how we managed to…"

"@damian Should be around 12~15 minutes."

"We were covered by regional television, some good footage of the drone in flight and our little test area. Althoug in french, I think it might interest those who liked the idea.
https://www.rtbf.be/video/detail_drone-inoffensif?id=2023185"