Here's a bit of background. The general idea is that Flybrix gives you an open source / open hardware kit with all the components you need to build a variety of multicopters. We give you bricks and plans for three designs to get you started - one quadcopter, one hexacopter, and one octocopter. After that the idea is that you'll have the experience needed to invent your own designs. I'd be thrilled to eventually host user creations on our site or through our app.
Ultimately, we're building Flybrix to get more kids interested in science and engineering. LEGO bricks and drones are great hooks for teaching trial and error experimentation and programming. I want Flybrix to be the best way for anybody to learn about aerial robotics. I want our customers to stay curious, explore, and break things.
Flybrix is a deep rabbit hole by design -- you can see all of the firmware at flybrix.com/github. Our kits are a lot more than just a toy drone. Each flight board is a powerful hobby computer with sensors, four RGB leds, bluetooth, and an SD card. We pay a premium for an easy to use bootloader that lets you program the board using the Arduino development environment.
Our drone is specifically designed to challenge everybody – from grade school to grad school.
@vnallatamby Well, I think we would hope to be on PH even if we had launched on Kickstarter... but that leaves the question of "Why not kickstarter?" (or, presumably, indiegogo, etc)
We've watched multiple drone companies make a crowdfunding splash and then go out of business since we started working together in 2014. We think crowdfunding creates unhealthy incentives for companies to invest in marketing hype at the expense of product development so we've been pretty reluctant to jump on the bandwagon. It basically comes down to long term brand association risk and substantial fees against short term marketing boost. We are confident that we could easily sell more kits than we should dare to promise to manufacture in time for Christmas this fall -- so it wasn't a hard decision for us to stick with a straightforward campaign directing public interest towards our Shopify site.
@eliservescent We started out making drones from balsa, aircraft birch, and 3d printed materials, but LEGO bricks let you snap together new ideas quickly. We make one custom brick with a machinist friend of mine in Xiamen, but all the rest are LEGO bricks we're sourcing on the used brick markets.
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