Blogs

3D Robotics

DIY Drones team at Maker Faire

Posted by Chris Anderson on May 23, 2011 at 10:00pm

3689408284?profile=originalMaker Faire was awesome. More than 100,000 people attended over two days, and it felt like almost all of them came by the DIY Drones booth! We had 12 team members manning the booth, and it took all of us to handle the crowds, which were usually two or three deep. Our cool t-shirts and hoodies were as popular as our electronics. Thanks to all who came to say hi!

 

Highlights included hanging out with the Google Cloud Robotics team (who worked with us on the PhoneDrone board) and Arduino co-founder Massimo Banzi coming by to meet with the team to coordinate our work with the Arduino roadmap (I can't say much more about it, but you're going to be blown away by what Arduino is capable of. Look for news later this summer, but the short form is if pro-level hardware and development tools are what you want, you won't be disappointed. The DIY Drones team is going to be a big part of it).

 

Shown above: Banzi with some of the DIY Drones and Udrones teams. From left; Jeff Taylor, me, Massimo Banzi, Jordi Munoz, Guillermo Romero, Sam Kelly, Lorenzo Lopez.

 

We did tons of demos, including one with Miles O'Brien from PBS's Newshour, where we filmed the newscast from the air while they were filming ArduCopter from below.

 

Here's a demo at the main stage, with Massimo and live GCS:

 

 

 

And towards the end, when Gigio was feeling really brave, he even did demos in the booth!

 

E-mail me when people leave their comments –
Follow

You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!

Join diydrones

Comments

  • Kirill May 24, 2011 at 12:53pm
    Excellent team! You are doing a great job!
  • Matt May 24, 2011 at 12:50pm
    Will DIYDrones be attending MakerFaire NYC this year? I would love to meet and talk to some of you guys.
  • Steve May 24, 2011 at 9:17am
    It was great to meet you in person Chris. Your booth was very busy, lots of interest in what your team is doing. Get an outdoor booth next year! :)
  • arashi May 24, 2011 at 8:56am

    Thanks for the stickers!

     

    What do you think about trying to get a netting flying area at the next Maker Faire?

    They had a RC Ship battle area, so I don't think it's inconceivable.

  • Developer
    Jani Hirvinen May 24, 2011 at 7:14am
    Only I was missing from there, well gotta be on next Maker Fair.
  • Developer
    John Arne Birkeland May 24, 2011 at 4:21am
    Please let's try and keep the safety hysteria normally found in R/C forums out of DIY. And anyway it looks like he was flying manually, so all he had to do was cut back the throttled and it would fall to the ground long before it got anywhere near the crowds. That's the one thing you can be pretty much sure of with a multicopter design, they come down again pretty quickly if something fails.. :)
  • robert bouwens May 23, 2011 at 10:24pm

    do you fly beta sw in front of crowded people?!?

    surprise.

This reply was deleted.