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!
Comments
Thanks for the kind words! Yes, you can think of it as a type of intelligent sensor hub. The overarching theme of what we wish to achieve with the developer kit is to control unique drones with a variety of different devices. Whether those devices are a smartphone, tablet, laptop, sensors/actuators, microcontrollers, etc. is entirely up to the developer.
The hub also comes with on-board services such as autopilot and scripting. And we'll continue to add features.
I wish you the best of luck! But I'm personally not wrapping my mind around how the actual interaction part functions. Is it some sort of intelligent sensor hub then?
@Jake: The Xbee can be switched out with other RF communication modules. The bluetooth is to make it easy for smartphones and other bluetooth-compatible devices to communicate with the drone.
Our goal is to make it easier to integrate flight with feedback from sensors and actuators to give developers a less frustrating experience. We've also seen that many people work with multiple autopilots and it becomes a pain to switch back and forth between the different software/hardware. Working with our board will mean that you can customize the software once on our system and plug it into different autopilots with no additional customization needed. This is also the reason why we do not want to be limited to any specific hardware platform at this time.
Appreciate your feedback and I hope this clears some things up for you. If not, I'd love to have an offline chat about your concerns. Always eager to learn more about how we can create a better product for the people who will be using it.
> I didn't intend for the listing of our past companies to sound arrogant.
Not at all. It's just that credentials don't mean much unless your ideas are good. There's plenty of PhD super genius types working minimum wage jobs or occupying bottom level positions.
I think you guys need a little clearer goal and a little better understanding of current tech. Xbees and bluetooth aren't going to cut it for most people.
I'm also not seeing exactly how the black box justifies it's cost. It will have to communicate and work with the autopilot to do anything useful. At that point why not do what you propose directly on the autopilot hardware?
It seems essentially you're proposing a co-processor board for the autopilot, but then you want to communicate with it via analog PWM signals?
@Nigel: We currently support any flight controller that communicates over PPM or PWM, not just limited to DJI and 3DR. We are also working on expanding this in the future.
iOS is in our roadmap over the next year. Sorry about the inconvenience.
It's hardly 'Universal' when it only supports DJI and 3DR at one end, and Android at the other...
@jake: Sorry about the lack of information on the post! I'd be happy to go deeper into what we are doing.
Our development board plugs into the RX port of the autopilot. To control the drone, we are communicating over Xbee to a Bluetooth repeater, which then communicates with any Bluetooth compatible device.
If you visit our site at developer.nvdrones.com and nvdrones.com you will find ample more information. If you have any other specific questions please don't hesitate to ask.
I didn't intend for the listing of our past companies to sound arrogant. I'm sorry if it came off that way. We'll be working very hard to prove our worth in the community :)
@dan: The types of apps will vary, but for instance controlling your drone in different ways like through an armband, using image processing through your phone, mapping land, etc. Our hope is to encourage creativity! The apps created with our SDK's runs on our development board that is plugged into the autopilot. Does that make things clearer?
Academic researchers search. We will know what is is about once they'll have found what they are searching for. Don't loose it :)
I don't know what it is but I feel naked without it now, where can I send my money so I can feel clothed in technology once more ;-)
Well, Jake was quite...direct...but I echo the sentiments. What is this about? What is a "drone app"? Are you talking about an app that runs on a coprocessor on the drone? To do what? Or an app that runs on the ground station to control the drone?
Expand a bit.
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