Hi everyone,

Its been a while since our last update for our closed beta. We've been busy working on our hardware, firmware, SDKs, and our pre-order page. 

We are excited to share the latest of our endeavors with the community.

As a reminder, NVdrones strives to offer the simplest way to write drone apps. We are hardware-agnostic, which means you can use use our board with any flight controller and additional hardware. If you can access the flight controller (using PPM or PWM) and attach our board to it, you can make an application for your drone in minutes.

Technical Specs/Features

Our hardware developer kit consists of two parts. The NVextender, which is connected to a flight controller on the drone through PPM/PWM, and a dongle, which is used by the ground station. This allows you to autonomously and remotely control the drone over Xbee (further clarification in the section below), whether it is an Arduino board, smartphone, or a PC.

The technical specifications of the NVextender is as follows:

• CPU: ATmega2560

• 8 programmable digital pins: with PWM support

• GPS port: easy attachment and auto-configuring

• Built-in Autopilot Features: Fly-Home, GPS hold, Fly-To position, etc.

• Easily Configurable Auto-Pilot (Coming Soon)

• Serial buss: SPI, I2C, and UART.

• External power: 4 power ports for servos, actuators and anything else needing extra power (total of 1 amp)

• Xbee port: Swappable module for wireless communication.

During development, we put a huge emphasis on easy expansion and extensions. Our goal is to allow you to build an entire end-to-end drone solution in the easiest way possible.  

The dongle, as mentioned above, is the device that stays on the ground and adds an Xbee wireless connection to whatever device you choose to write your app for.

The technical specification of the dongle is as follows:

• Xbee port: Swappable module for wireless communication.

• Bluetooth: to be used with a smartphone

• USB: to be used with a PC or MAC

• Serial: to be used with a Arduino board

• Rechargeable battery over microUSB

You can think of the dongle as a small box that adds Xbee to your device. In addition, since we didn’t obscure the communication with the Xbee in any way (we use serial for passing the data back and forth), our dongle in theory could also be used in other projects.

Flow Diagram

The Arduino SDK

We are proud to say that we underwent a major refactoring of our Arduino SDK. Although it slightly pushed our schedule back, we’ve optimized the code and so now you can easily interact with virtually any sensor, actuator, etc. You can check out the latest documentation for version 0.3 at developers.nvdrones.com. We believe it’s a truly easy-to-use, robust, and flexible SDK for developers to enjoy. Additional SDK’s are also on its way, so stay tuned.

Pre-Order for 20% Off

We are also excited to announce our pre-order store. This means that we are getting closer to full release where our early adopters can get their hands dirty with our platform and technology. Shipping in July!

Order now and get 20% off retail of $199. This equates to a $159 price tag.

Maker Faire

Last but not least, we will have a booth at Maker Faire between the 15th and 17th of May. If you are planning on attending, please stop by to say "hi" at Booth #5623!

We are going to have 3 stations where you will be able to test our SDKs live on actual hardware and drones.

We will have a set of drones where attendees can easily control:

- Servos,

- Gimbal,

- Sonars,

- LEDs,

- Integrate thermometer data

Please join us and feel free to spread the word around the Internets :) Happy flying!

Hi everyone,

My name is Kevin, one of the co-founders of NVdrones, and I'm happy to announce that today we are launching a closed beta for our drone software development platform, meant to dramatically simplify the drone software development experience. 

Who Are We?

I'd like to speak briefly about who we are and how we got to this point. We are a team of mostly recent college graduates from USC, and our team has past experience at places such as SpaceX, Qualcomm, Amazon, IdeaLab, and Wheego Electric Vehicles. We spent a lot of our time in the past few years building our own drones from scratch for various clients, from artists to emergency services personnel. Along the way, we noticed a few things: The first is that drone software development is difficult to use in its current state and contains a pretty harsh learning curve. The second is that there are so many different platforms out there on the market that it's hard to decide which ones to use and which ones are best.

On a side note: That Drone Show did a segment on us at the LA Drone Expo that you can watch here: 

What Do We Do?

We set out to create a low-cost and universal software development platform that would solve both of these issues. Our development board that runs our software is plug-n-play compatible with any flight controller that uses a standard RC transmitter and we've made it very easy to attach sensors and actuators using our SDK's. Today's release and documentation contains high-level libraries for Arduino, but our Android and Javascript libraries will be released very soon.

Our goal is that you don't have to be a drone expert or know all the inner workings of a drone in order to create amazing drone applications. 

What Are The Next Steps?

If you're interested in learning more, please register for our closed beta at developers.nvdrones.com or contact us by e-mailing developers@nvdrones.com or messaging me here. We're really excited about the possibilities of the platform and we've been getting a lot of very positive feedback. Our highest priority is to work together with as many people as possible in order to simplify the process from the point of idea creation all the way to end-user implementation. 

The purpose of this closed beta is to work closely together with as many people as possible so that we can achieve our goal of simplicity. This doesn't only apply to just our code, but also our documentation, tutorials, examples, and everything else that is part of the developer experience. 

Happy flying!