Well the big news of this week, this month and possibly this year is that Colin Guinn is back in the multicopter business and this time with 3D Robotics, his employment was confirmed this afternoon.
Colin Guinn was the global face of DJI on YouTube, known for his tutorials on using the Phantom, he specifically credited his team for DJI’s 27,000 Facebook likes and 30,000 YouTube subscribers and millions of views in the injunction against DJI that was filed on 22nd of January 2014.
The fact 3D Robotics is a US company and Guinn has experience building up a multicopter brand in America makes for an interesting combination.
The multicopter masses had a love hate relationship with Colin Guinn, his tutorials on the Phantom were universally well received but there was frustration that problems such as fly-aways were never really addressed except on one video by Mitch Bergsma, which DJI recently tried to have taken down but appeared to relent after a social media outcry, even this video presented fly-aways as a preventable user error which isn’t a fair analysis.
If Colin Guinn enters the social media limelight for 3D Robotics, it would be welcomed if this time around there’s a more open and honest appraisal of the benefits along with the risks of using multicopters.
Colin Guinn clearly is successful at marketing but new users of multicopters such as those from professional photography backgrounds expect excellent customer service such as that offered by Canon, so marketing spin alone isn’t enough. 3D Robotics has to date offered, especially to IRIS users, very good customer service, that is a focus it cannot afford to lose.
3D Robotics is playing catch up, whilst its newest quadcopter the IRIS has a loyal following and has a lot of power features, it clearly wasn’t designed for video photography and the offering of the Tarot gimbal really isn’t inspiring. With Colin Guinn on board, could his passion for creating video with multicopters help 3D Robotics redefine its product offerings?
Comments
@P13
A stable tune will return to level in stabilize when you jerk the stick suddenly in roll or pitch.
I start with a Stab_P of something conservative like the default 4.5.
Then a conservative Rate_D of .005
Try a rate_P of .1 and increase to give it more responsiveness. You may be able to go up quite high, but the goal is to get it to respond well, not perfect.
Once it flies OK and returns to level without feeling out of control, try Auto-tune.
The reason you want it to be somewhat tuned before starting is the gains are swapped with every set point change. If your gains aren't in the ballpark, it won't return to level under control. Or you may have issues when you bring it back to you after it has drifted away due to wind.
Jason
And BTW, Colin has been terrific to work with and I'm really excited he's here at 3DR!
Jason
@P13
I spent some time with Leonard last week testing and reviewing Auto-tune. What I learned was Auto-tune won't crash your copter if you start with a stable tune, but it will crash a copter that isn't properly spec'd.
Large copters can easily overpower and burnout ESCs or loose sync when doing these 20° step changes in angle. This is not really the fault of the auto-tune algorithm or Pixhawk. If something goes wrong during the test, it was bound to happen eventually in flight. I would avoid SimonK ESC's in any motor than can draw a lot of current. When you have a large moment arm on a copter, the added speed of SimonK is useless anyway. Better to stick with well filtered traditional ESCs.
Jason
Unfortunately, I'm sure they could pass an ISO audit just fine. The thing about ISO, is it's not about "quality" in the sense that most people assume. It's just about "do what you document, document what you do". So if you document that you put out crap quality, that's totally fine. If one of your core operating methods is "Never ever admit to bugs, ever." then that is totally fine too.
Thanks Andy but of course, i'm kidding.
Aaron: nicely put. Once the Drone Code Foundation is up and running, the wikis will run under that. One tricky thing is that the consequences of errors in the wiki can be crashes or worse, so it can't be open to anyone to edit (there must be a review process with experts, much like code). That means a very robust organization and procedures, which is difficult for volunteers to manage effectively over the many hundreds of pages and hundreds of thousands of words in the wiki.
My hope is that the Foundation can set this up and staff it to achieve what we in the community all want. In the meatime, the 3DR documentation is all professionally written and edited by our team and can be found here.
Hi Colin, you're welcome!
But remember, at the moment "Marco Robustini was the global face of 3DRobotics on YouTube"... :P
Dave, I'm not sure if you've been aware, but that was the original idea of the .ardupilot.com wikis. There's been a lot of contention which reached a head when Gary McCray, who had been the head wiki author, decided he'd had enough of what he saw as 3DR's heavy-handed management of the wiki. See for example http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/i-really-need-help-solving-a-pr... . He's left and gone and made www.dronesarefun.com, and says he hopes to make it community editable at some point. The corporate / community connection is always tricky and 3DR is figuring it out in fits and starts. In my opinion, we need a community wiki that is totally independent of 3DR and not beholden to the interests of their investors. I remember when the wiki was on googlecode. It had a "comments" section on each page, and it was fairly easy to ask and be granted edit access (that's probably still true). The comments sections quickly became a useless mess. I wrote a page there about how to get Eclipse set up for APM editing which got out of date and then I never found the time to update it. In sum, it's not a cut and dry situation. Community / corporate interaction seems to work fairly well on the codebase because of pull requests. I guess we need pull requests for the docs too. Maybe the docs should all go under git.
mP1: Thanks for the feedback on the documentation, but I wanted to be sure that you knew that the wiki is created by the volunteer community here, not 3DR. I'm sure the developers and editors would love your help in implementing your excellent suggestions. If you can PM me an email address, I can ask the editors to add you to that group so you can work with them directly to make those improvements.
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