After receiving much attention over the past few days, the aforementioned Eye3 Drone project on Kickstarter has been officially pulled on account of photoshop shenanigans and overall shadiness.
From IEEE Automation Blog:
"At first glance, the eye3 drone seemed like an incredible deal. For US $2500, you could get yourself a beefy hexacopter capable of lifting over 6.8 kilograms (15 pounds) with an included autopilot that would take all of the hassle and stress out of flying the UAV...
People on the Internet, being people on the Internet, did some digging and found out several things. First, the pictures of the kit on Kickstarter are just pictures of this kit (from cnchelicopter.com) with the attribution photoshopped out. Also, the founders of eye3 allegedly owe a bunch of people money (or a product) on another project."
Comments
Hope the printrbot guy, hasn't skipped town, an lying on a beach sipping margaritas.
He's going to need some help printing and assembling those printrbots. He should be able to buy a few industrial SLS process printers to do it faster, and cheaper.
Somebody succeeded anyway with Open Hardware:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/printrbot/printrbot-your-first-...
http://printrbot.com/
http://reprap.org/wiki/Printrbot
Waiting the NetStore Opening ;-P
eye3 was so close, but ...
I find the whole Kickstarter business model a little "loosy goosy". The idea of paying money for nice media presentations, with no controls, to ensure delivery is just too risky. People think twice about buying stock in a corporation, because they're afraid of loosing their money. But somehow people don't seem to have that inhibition on Kickstarter. At least with corporate stock, you can always ask them to send you a stock certificate.
Not to add flames to this already scorched topic, but what the heck…
Hoax /hōks/
Using a photosopped image of someone else's work to represent your "project" without even mentioning the kit to begin with - places this squarely in Hoaxville territory. THe added buffoonery of these guys having unpaid debts for past failed "projects" seals the deal.
I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't even built and flown this hexrotor.
Like so many Kickstarter "projects" this was really nothing more than a nice idea articulated in blog form. IMO, there is no project until your hands get dirty.
If I were a crotchety old man (some think I already am even though I'm young - ha) I would say "this is the problem with America today." Too many kids think they deserve to get paid for just having good ideas. I was raised to understand that creativity is rewarded only after the hard work gets done. BTW, I thought Kickstarter was just for hipsters, failed artists and indie game designers? Real men bootstrap their businesses, pansies ask for handouts. ok i'll stop now
Yeah, I also got the impression that they're not bad people (charlatans), but just that they have dreams which are bigger than reality. Is what they are doing really that much different than any other entrepreneurial enterprise which fails? 90% of new business startups fail. I think the only difference in this case is that normally it's landlords and bankers are left holding the bad credit when a startup fails. Nobody cares about them. In this case however, it appears to be the customers who lost their money. Optically, it looks bad.
It's hard to know what is in a person's heart, but after reading through alot of the posts and links and forums dedicated to Grayson and Kellie Sigler, I would like to believe that if each of these many projects had "maxed out", they would have been financially successful and been able to bring these projects to fruition.
On the other hand, it seems obvious that they were all just pipedreams waiting for the full financing to come from people placing orders and trusting they would get product. (much of which would only exist if the complete project was soldout)
If not for some underperforming projects and poor health, this couple may have been hailed as marketing geniuses rather than the charlatans many are branding them now.
@Paul, how could they possibly have been using the system for 2 years, developing the system, and tuning PID's when the AC2 code isn't even out of Beta yet, and frankly... it's functionality with APM2 is questionable at the current time. (ie: there are issues we're still working through).
Yes, it was close enough to reality to fool people. But we all know that the claims were just a little unrealistic, coupled with their delivery date of April/2012. The problem I found with it, is that they were making the claims, as if it already existed, instead of it being in development. And we all know the availability status of APM2 boards, right now. According to Jordi, back orders are shipping in about Feb. And, it seemed that they had not contacted any suppliers to check to see if stock was available, as far as we know.
Given the rate at which sponsors were coming on board, Kickstarter probably decided they didn't need that kind of risk.
I think "hoax" and "scam" may be too harsh, but "success factors" were not indicated for this project.
Check out the other thread where, we discussed in more details about this project:
http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/apm-powered-hexacopter-project-...
I think the scam lies in the message that operating this hexa would be easy for even a novice and that using 6 motors somehow induced redundancy for safety's sake when the fact is that when a hexa loses a motor the flight is over. My initial prediction was that the average customer would not be able to get past the training/PID tuning flights and end up with a pile of parts. This was no Blade MCX.
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