Why we wanted HeX at the first place?
1. We wanted it to be able to tackle the contradiction between small aircraft’s size and carriage capacity
2. we wanted it to be omnipotent to accomplish various advanced tasks as human’s replacement in circumstances where human being is incapable.
That resulted in 3 features in HeX : modular design, flexible to peripherals and an open platform of robotic aircraft for hackers.
We thought HeX with the 3 prominent features would be able to cover a wide range of demands in market.
To well demonstrate its potential to wow people in various fields, we decided to make it an air filming kit for outdoor activity fans which can track and film the target automatically and can be used as simply as clicking some buttons
A Change of Strategy
But almost 1 month ago, we had a meeting and made some strategic changes after that. During the meeting, we broke down the logic order of why we want HeX and reviewed the technological and engineering complexity. After rounds of passionate and inspiring discussion, we found what made us really go nuts about HeX was not other features but the very first one: its portability and capacity adaptability given by a modular design, and the use as an air filming kit which might bring revolution to personal and family entertainment.
Before we made a change to our market and development strategy, we went through some technological possibilities:
1. whether ARM can be fast enough to run an tracking algorithm as an airborne computer
2. whether existing tracking algorithm is sophisticated enough to give HeX a stable performance when it is tracking and filming the target in the air
Finally, we decided to temporarily abandon the idea of making HeX an open platform of robotic aircraft. We temporarily don’t want it to be able to carry various different peripherals.
We just want it to be an all-time awesome and portable air-filming kit because personal and family entertainment is already a huge enough business and the market of it is massive.
Now the new born HeX is going to be an portable air-filming kit. It’s going to be revolutionary to both robot-making world and personal-entertaining world.
Comments
well, there might be some ambiguity about the direction of HeX. the true intention of this blog was trying to say that we prefer to make HeX a highly compacted product which can be easily enjoyed by users who know very little about technologies rather than a platform which is highly flexible for tech pros to tailor for their own purposes.
At the same time, we still want HeX to be an open source project because we search, pick and collect mature enough technologies that HeX can use through open source projects. It would be so selfish, shallow and short sighted if we made it a close-source project and didn't pay back to the open source community.
So we will not only broadcast the whole process of making the prototype lively on the official website of HeX, but also share the codes and research results after we have the prototype finished.
Plus, in order to get as much support as possible from talents, we welcome any forms of possible collaboration throughout the world. So anyone has interest in this project can contact us by email.
This is amazing! The modular approach is clever! If only this were open source, it would be perfect!