Irresponsable and Immoral

Lately I have been following the kikstarter project “The pocket Drone” which is having a huge impact.
First of all I am a bit pissed off because in the kikstarter project https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/airdroids/the-pocket-drone-your-personal-flying-robot there is just this mention to Ardupilot!
• APM compatible flight controller 6-axis accelerometers, 3 axis gyroscopes, barometric sensor (altitude)

There is not any comment or anything relating DIYD or 3DR!

Second in this interview

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tyvfu23eMOQ they present the product without even mentioning Arducopter, but when they are asked on what OS do they use they say “currently is based in the arducopter OS, is using an opencourse plataform that we’ve added layers on top” (I am sure you did…) at minute 8:30 if you want to here it.

I think that is totally immoral that a guys that all what did was print a tricoper and arrange with Chinese manufacturer for cheap electronics, pretend to be what they pretend to be!

But the truly important problem is not that. On both sites they are giving to understand that this is product that does not need any special attention or precaution, even less any experience! In a lot of moments things like “it always seemed like either mom or dad (the photographer) was missing from family pictures. We’re proud to announce the launch of The Pocket Drone to address these challenges. Many of our supporters are calling it the "GoPro of drones." “ are said. What! How can you compare a product like Arducopter to a GoPro camera? That just needs you to press a button to record! When in the documentation is said hundreds of times that this is something to take seriously (and I think is not said enough).
So I think this is actually a fraud, they are pretending to sell a thing that they are not selling, but even more important to my point of view is that for the moment there is 1200 people that has not any experience with drones that bought one (I say 1200 because there is 1200 totally RTF kits sold at the moment on Kikstarter).
So in a few months at least 1200 people will go out with a drone thinking that is as easy to control as a gopro. And they all, all without any exception will crash and god knows what else!
I find it really worrying, and I think that since we are the community that is actually behind that project (even though they pretend we’re not) we should take some actions about it. Not allowing that people is tricked, and not allowing not necessary accidents to happen.

Hi Guys,

There are several attempts to capitalize on multicopters, it is an easy Kickstarter target, like 3D vision.

Some of them actually design something interesting others have figured out the Snap, Crackle and Pop.

A fair number of things get funded by the Wizard of Oz approach.

And the bigger and more important you can make people think you are the more likely you are to succeed.

A lot of this is done by rank amateurs with no actual business experience at all, simply they have read through a bunch of "successful" Kickstarter fundings and have said to themselves I can do that, Hmm what will I "make".

At ~50,000 past and present members, DIYDrones is clearly the preiminent information source for everything auto pilot and I dare say everything multicopter.

But our focus on APM can enable somebody else to make the claim we are " the world’s largest community organization dedicated to teaching people to build and operate their own flying robots". (regardless of how small that might actually be).

I am afraid there is too much smoke and mirrors and too little substance here for there to be much real value, but hey if they manage to deliver what they say they will, its a nice little copter.

There is plenty of room here for everybody.

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Comments

Developer

John Arne Birkeland February 24, 2014 at 5:51pm

@Carles, that ship has sadly already sailed with the DJI Phantom. There are already many thousands of "pilots" out there who think they just bought a flying GoPro to be used wherever and however they want. Even the 3DR Iris is in that boat.
Carles Gelada February 24, 2014 at 5:12pm

brett i am assuming that for a RTF kit of 600US they are not gonna give a good transmitter.
Carles Gelada February 24, 2014 at 5:10pm

I think you guys are paying more attention to the way they try to hide who is actually behind the copter, that the fact that they are gonna give drones to people who thinks that are as easy to control as a gopro. That could have bad concequences to all of the drone community, and specially to a few unfortunates who at their first flight crashed on someones head.
Brett Smith February 24, 2014 at 4:33pm

I am not familiar with their transmitter...
I haven't even used ArduPilot extensively (I've been playing around trying to build my own platform), but I still have received lots of help from nice people here.

Honestly, from what I can perceive, the major incentive in developing open-source projects is to create easy access to information/tools. This way people can adopt it for there own needs and continue the "breeding"of innovation. It is unfortunate to see someone try to license a project that is created by open source tools, but open-source business models are relatively new. So it is always interesting to see how different people try to pull it together.

It would be interesting to see a world where all ideas and tools were public domain. But I wonder if in order for innovation to really excel we need to be able to assign liability when things don't work...
Rob_Lefebvre February 24, 2014 at 3:51pm

Just another Johnny-come-lately that going to make a profit off of all the hard work put into the Ardupilot code by a number of people. There's not that much new here.
Gary McCray February 24, 2014 at 3:19pm

Hi Guys,

There are several attempts to capitalize on multicopters, it is an easy Kickstarter target, like 3D vision.

Some of them actually design something interesting others have figured out the Snap, Crackle and Pop.

A fair number of things get funded by the Wizard of Oz approach.

And the bigger and more important you can make people think you are the more likely you are to succeed.

A lot of this is done by rank amateurs with no actual business experience at all, simply they have read through a bunch of "successful" Kickstarter fundings and have said to themselves I can do that, Hmm what will I "make".

At ~50,000 past and present members, DIYDrones is clearly the preiminent information source for everything auto pilot and I dare say everything multicopter.

But our focus on APM can enable somebody else to make the claim we are " the world’s largest community organization dedicated to teaching people to build and operate their own flying robots". (regardless of how small that might actually be).

I am afraid there is too much smoke and mirrors and too little substance here for there to be much real value, but hey if they manage to deliver what they say they will, its a nice little copter.

There is plenty of room here for everybody.
Carles Gelada February 24, 2014 at 2:42pm

and why would they buy a kit with a bad transmitter ?
Brett Smith February 24, 2014 at 2:41pm

I think you should give hobbyists more credit, I would guess that a hefty percentage of those people going on to kickstarter to back a project like this are already involved in RC in some form.
Carles Gelada February 24, 2014 at 2:39pm

Actually I was thinking... a lots of opensource licenses force any comertial activity to mention the opensource project. Does someone knows if that is the case?
AKRCGUY February 24, 2014 at 2:30pm

I agree with Eli on them commenting about the "Largest community". We (DIYDrones) were around long before they were and have 10 times the members not to mention the Arducopter platform.

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