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Sub-$300 quadrotor kit released on Kickstarter

Posted by Max Bruner on October 15, 2012 at 5:30pm
R10.jpg?width=400
Hey guys, thanks for so many helpful and kind comments in my last blog post. 

Our Kickstarter project was just accepted after a lengthy review process! So I'm glad to announce the R10, a sub-$300 quadrotor kit aimed at hobbyists and academia.

Take a look! http://kck.st/T6e7mu

And our website: http://www.uair.co

This is my first time with a Kickstarter project, so any thoughts and suggestions very welcome and appreciated!
Max
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Comments

  • Max Bruner October 17, 2012 at 7:01pm

    Hi Robero,

    Our firmware has not been ported to any other flight controller, and we're not using a public repository at the moment as it's still in development.  The old version of the flight controller that was on the ROFL quadcopters used to be on the website until it was updated (but if you want to take a look, I can dig it out again for you).

    The bootloader on the chip is integrated into the ROM, so there is no need to flash a bootloader.  The ROM functions include the USB bootloader features that you see in the video, so the drag & drop firmware update support is available on the chip straight from the factory.  Technically this makes the chip "unbrickable", as some have claimed.
    Max

  • Moderator
    Roberto Navoni October 17, 2012 at 3:10pm

    Hi Max,

    congratulation for your nice project :) i see that  you are using an Arm Cortex M3 very smilar of STM32f1 are your firmware arducopter ported on stm32 ? Where is your repo ? I see that it's opensource. The method for update firmware is very nice do you have more info about your bootloader ?

    Best

    Roberto

  • John Condon October 17, 2012 at 1:32pm

    @Mark

    I looked into and actually made a prototype quad-ESC for another project I was doing.  The hard part about making a 3rd party quad or hex ESC is making a board that can fit any frame.  Also, if one of the four failed, you can't just replace the single ESC, the whole board is toast.  

    However, if it was designed for a specific frame (like mine was) it ends up being cheaper, lighter, and neater than four individual ESCs.  It's also fun to be able to say that your board can drive multiple kilowatts. :)

  • LanMark October 16, 2012 at 10:35pm

    cool.. perfect.  :) 

  • Developer
    Jani Hirvinen October 16, 2012 at 9:39pm

    Mark, yes we are doing new ESCs. first set of hardwares are already in production and they should arrive soon for developers. That OpenESC is one of our projects. There are several other projects too running parallel.

  • Yuan Gao October 16, 2012 at 9:35pm

    @Mark Lanning: have you tried these guys? https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/openesc I think they were basically tackling the problem from exactly that point of view.

  • LanMark October 16, 2012 at 8:45pm

    How come no one creates/redesigns the ESCs.  ESCs seem like they were made for single motor applications but with quad and hex copter not so much.  Hobbyking has some quad based ESC.. but I think there is a lot of innovation there.. we also don't need 4 BEC circuits..  would be cool to see a single ESC that has a 4 motor output.

  • Max Bruner October 16, 2012 at 6:39pm

    @Tian, thanks for noticing the flight controller! Thalamus, is actualy an evolution of our older Forebrain/Seraphim system, which uses the same family of ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers and proved to be a success. I think we have a good system here, the fairly fast 72MHz 32-bit MCU does provide excellent cost-performance ratio.  We are planning on releasing more details about the controller later on next week, so keep your eyes peeled.

  • Max Bruner October 16, 2012 at 6:27pm

    Thanks everyone for your support and constructive input.

    Regarding the cable tidy and ESCs: the ESCs are actually heat-shrunk onto the aluminium frames, using the frames as a large heatsink (you can see it in the video below).  But you're right, there may be a cooling issue for particularly heavy loads, or instances where the user has replaced the default ESCs (we do supply those ESCs not attached to the frame in case people need to replace them).  We're going to look into it, it may be that we would need to recommend people not use the cable tidies for heavy loads.  That would be a shame, but sometimes there's no easily achievable solution.

  • Tian October 16, 2012 at 5:41pm

    It is quite amazing how quickly this went onto the market from the day you made that first post. At the current rate, you guys will be funded within another day or two. The controller is quite an interesting design. Very few people are going into the ARM MCU world for multirotor controllers, so you should consider putting more focus on that. I'm sure lots of people will be interested in the extra power that the cortex mcus have. 

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