As many of you know, Jordi Munoz and I founded 3DR in 2009 as a way to help get drone technology into the hands of the masses. And it certainly has reached the masses—these days, there’s never a day without many drone stories being published, and interest only continues to grow.
3DR continues to grow and evolve. Where we were once a company focused on bags of parts and bare boards, we are increasingly centered around integrated products that just work for people, products that allow people to focus on the results rather than the mechanism. Additionally, we’re placing bigger bets on a smaller number of products, with Solo being the prime example (so far!). Today, we are more than 200 employees and the overall business grew by more than 500% this year.
Like the drone industry overall, we have evolved from a DIY company to a mass-production company and now compete directly with DJI and Parrot, both of which manufacture in large-scale factories in Shenzhen. We do the same with the Solo family and our future products.
For those of you who are familiar with my 2012 book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, you may recall that this was always the plan. The above is a chart from that book, which shows that as volumes approach 100,000 units a year, economies of scale and a focus on margins require a move to mass production and deep supply chain integration. That's the volume 3DR is now at. For a product that increasingly resembles a smartphone, this scale can really only be done in Shenzhen, the capital of the smartphone industry.
As part of this transition, we are in the process of sunsetting many of our legacy products, which were made in our Tijuana factory. There are now many great frames available, many supplier of FPV cameras, and many companies focused solely on very specific drone components. In the process of winding down some of our older products, we’ll do our best to point you to alternatives. And of course, many of you here already build and release technology that surpasses what exists commercially today!
Going forward, we will focus on the Solo family and other core elements of our next-gen platform. In particular, we will continue to offer Pixhawk-compatible autopilots, with improved versions designed in cooperation with partners. And autopilots continue to be a core focus of 3DR, with exciting new platforms coming in 2016.
3DR will continue to work on making a difference where we can best do so: in providing highly integrated, innovative, and fully configurable complete systems. Additionally, we will continue to provide tools to enable people to stretch the boundaries of what this technology can do, and to work with true innovators like those in this community to build the core elements of our common drone future.
You can count on us continuing to be VERY active in the DIY Drones community (today, seven years after founding it, I still post and comment every day -- it’s a source of constant joy and amazement for me, and one of my proudest creations). You all have been a central part of 3DR’s vision and development and will continue to be so—and we will continue to be active contributors back to both this community and the broader Dronecode development project -- indeed, this focus on becoming a much bigger company will allow us to devote even more resources into contributing open source code to the community and recruiting more partners to do so as well.
At 43 companies and counting, Dronecode has more than doubled over the past year, and we will lead its march as the world’s leading open drone platform by extending the platform into video, the cloud and advanced computing by creating world-class developers tools such as Dronekit and the Solo SDK.
Thanks,
Chris
Comments
DJI, singularly absent in applications within the research and industry world, understands this, btw. Witness the introduction of an SDK and, just today, the Manifold as secondary computer. A sort of response to Pixhawk and companion computers, about a year later ... No plane and hybrid VTOL possibilities yet, though.
There are RTF commercial systems, but from what I've seen most of them suffer from problems such as:
- Too expensive for what you're really getting.
- Not field repairable, and someday, you will need field repair.
- Not actually engineered that well.
- Closed source, not feature complete, or behind state of the art, and not modifiable by the end user.
- Don't deliver on claimed performance specs.
I see a huge market potential for a well engineered commercial RTF system, but which is repairable, extensible, customizable, high quality and moderate cost.
I guess there is DIY "Hobby/consumer" and DIY "professional", as in custom, professional solutions. I don't know about the direction of DIY hobby, but in the professional world custom "DIY" solutions absolutely dominate (except at the low end of the photography and film business). You are just not going to do professional aerial mapping, agriculture applications, search and rescue, professional Lidar, etc ..., in short any sort of advanced application, with RTFs and no FC advanced access.
This is also why "DIY", as in flexible platforms based around Pixhawk, is by far the first platform (most of the time the only one) used in research and industrial environments. This could change, but so far there are no signs of any trend reversal. And while the consumer market is a large market, the professional one is potentially enormous, and most likely to experience significant growth.
Craig, I don't question your stats on this website's traffic. But neither would I attach an observation as to the wider DIY communities growth on this website.
Who's the number 1 frame maker? Tarot. Do they sell anything RTF? No. RCG now has 5 subforums for multirotor discussion, whereas before they only had 1. Even the old-time helicopter forums have multirotor subforums, and they're not all talking RTF.
Marc, I don't doubt that some segments of the DIY market are shrinking. The Chinese are taking the bottom out of the market, so if you're trying to compete on just price alone, you probably are hurting. Meanwhile, the higher end is pretty messed up. You have Wookong, A2, Ace One, all pretty much forgotten by DJI, lacking features, buggy, with no updates, I'm not surprised to see these systems for sale.
@Rob - I hope you are right and the DIY market it is not shrinking. I have heard some people closer to the business end of this that it is dramatically shrinking in some many sectors outside of FPV racing. I have no numbers though.
Intuitively it makes sense that it may as RTF options (be it Solo/Inspire/Phanton/Yuneec) achieve more than can be done by DIY easily. Go check the RCGroups classifieds. They have an ever expanding selection of higher end AP machines designed to carry GH4s and Nex class cameras.
Is it just me that notices theyre riding the wave up, but the graph fails to show the next down turn.
Is there a sustained market cycle for drones? A market has to have its limits. We're kind of stuck on AP platforms.
Where is the next step? It has to be heavy lifters and long duration drones.
Solo was sold as an upgrade platform. So once they saturate the market with units, Is it the upgrades that are manufactured in the 100,000's?
Is there a plan to get the products to consumers on time and as advertised?
Or is the plan still to rely on the consumer to point out the issues ?
Is there a point in which you plan to bring in the best minds of the company and house them together so future products dont suffer basic design flaws such as Solo's gimbal clearance.
Its hard to maintain confidence if Solo has not yet reached its advertised initial capabilities.
Qualcomm and other investors have to notice that development is not keeping release dates.
If we're talking a new revolution of products, youre going to have to not only innovate, but deliver.
The market and consumers have a short attention span. As you can see smart shots are now being implemented in other products and in the SDKs of these products, yet Solo, the flagship of AP with smart shots is still lacking basic camera controls.
Its not even a question of: Where are we going?, it boils down to why cant we get to the starting line to deliver an experience to consumers out of the box?
I'm a stats guy so maybe I'm wrong. This site has seen decreased traffic (slowly headed downward) for the last couple of years - a time when the market in general is up 6 to 8 fold. That speaks to me...about something!
A lot of DIY'ers - perhaps myself included - were DIY because we were fiddling around trying to make our machines do what we envisioned them to do (not crash, be fun, take great photos and videos, etc.).
There is a much more serious group of hobbyists who will always be in it for the science and engineering.
I see it as being similar to HAM - I was a HAM for many years and when the internet came around I still visited my more serious friends who were "real HAMs" and found them doing slow scan image transmission...while I was building an internet empire (so to speak). They liked climbing towers and having 4 letter call signs...while many, like myself, moved on to the angle we were most interested in (communication, in this case).
Once many of the underpinnings have been created - as with this pursuit - it doesn't take as many folks (outside of the paid jobs at corps and universities, etc.) to move the ball forward. IMHO.
There are numbers hidden in those site stats.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CSWssoSUEAA0BEw.png:large
If 10X more people are interested in drones and the main DIY site is on a downslope (or even even or slightly growing), that's numbers. Maybe not the kind of numbers you believe in - but I do.
You could come up with an alternative explanation, but Occam's Razor is probably more correct.
@Craig, I think it's a mistake to think that DIY/Hobby market is shrinking. Maybe not growing at the supernova rate of the RTF consumer market, but it's still growing. There are still many people, particularly in the commercial market, for whom there is no RTF option that suits their needs.
As always, where are the numbers you are basing your statements on?
What an interesting journey this is. I'm sure it will continue to be fascinating and a lot of fun.
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