6 ms·

Slightly off topic, but I just wanted to point out that this technology they're working on is largely within reach of you as a hobbyist today. What's impressive

Slightly off topic, but I just wanted to point out that this technology they're working on is largely within reach of you as a hobbyist today. What's impressive is the engineering resources and software control systems they're adding. But for less than $300, you can build a small 6" quadcopter from base parts, purchase a small control radio, and a pair of inexpensive FPV goggles+transmitter+receiver. Yeah, less than $300. China's amazing at this. If you get a permit for it in the US (or ignore the law), $50 more gets you radios with miles of range. Your primary limit will be batteries (solutions exist, but bust the budget a bit, fixed wing drones are a lot of more economical here). But there is nothing magical or special about Switzerland other than a concentration of interest. If you wanted, you could start competing with these folks and stand up in front of a shady incubator looking for your economic kickstart really, really fast. You don't need to fabricate parts to build prototypes and most of this stuff is mass produced.

polskibus 8y ago
What parts would you recommend to build a drone that's on par with mavic air ( incl. Gimbal)?
- KirinDave 8y ago
  I'd recommend going to the youtube Channels Rotor Riot and UAV Futures (and possibly Mr. Steele) if you want to get a nice series of well-sourced introductory materials by veteran professional drone operators. I'm by far an amateur, and don't really have enough sim hours to fly the drone I'm just about done assembling. But: the aerial camera gimbal is by far the hardest part to get right, and why vendors like DJI charge what they charge. Software exists to make it work, though.
- natvert 8y ago
  If you want a mavic, just buy a mavic, building something with this level quality / reliability is not worth the effort. The advantage to building your own is that you get a different type of quad -- a racing quad which feels more like flying a porsche (feels like a race car) than an mini-van (e.g. mavic, reliable but super fun to fly). If you want to build a racer, rctimer has some of the best kits (high quality parts, well thought out design). Here's an old build guide from my blog, you would want to get a newer kit with an omnibus-based flight controller, but the idea is the same: https://nathan.vertile.com/blog/2016/04/24/rctimer-u210-mini-quad-build-setup-and-review/ https://nathan.vertile.com/blog/2016/04/24/rctimer-u210-mini... Also, if you're just learning to fly, you probably want to learn acro/rate mode (which is full manual mode) on something smaller first, like this maybe: https://nathan.vertile.com/blog/2017/03/31/betaflight-micro-brushless-aurora-100/ https://nathan.vertile.com/blog/2017/03/31/betaflight-micro-...
mc32 8y ago
Do you know off hand if the toy copter cos are looking to take advantage of the affordability of this kind of tech, or are thry just too old fashioned to care?
- KirinDave 8y ago
  You can absolutely buy a tinywhoop or something like that. You can even wire them for FPV, which is a cool way to experience life in your house as a fly. But the prices aren't just affecting the floor models. DJI's had to move into the $300 range (I literally just bought one) because of steep competition in small shops making custom drones and other vendors pushing the cost down as various manufacturing houses spin up.
  - mc32 8y ago
    The Cheapest one I saw was the Spark at 399 --looks great but looks like best experience would require doubling that for the goggles as well. Still; looks enticing!
Matthias247 8y ago
> But there is nothing magical or special about Switzerland other than a concentration of interest. You could say similar things about Silicon Valley. And yet most people agree that it’s a super important place for all tech stuff. So it seems to be a very relevant factor.
- tnecniv 8y ago
  That area is pretty tech oriented and there are a number of research groups in at ETHZ that work with drone platforms exclusively. It's no accident that the Valley is next to a group of strong universities.
- servs 8y ago
  I wouldn't say so. SV has always had quite specific points that, for a lot of people, made it more appealing than the alternatives. There are a number of technology "interested" areas in the US including Dallas, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, New York and a lot more "lesser" ones that aren't SV.
- Annatar 8y ago
  Having lived in Silicon Valley, there is one magical thing: climate. It is warm year-round; Spring comes in January; You can go surf in the morning, go to work, and ski in the evening. Did I mention afternoons with 23 - 25 degrees Celsius in January?
escherplex 8y ago
These things are fun to toy with. For greater transmit power (and a slew of frequencies to experiment with) I'd suggest getting a US general ham radio license, which are relatively easy to acquire. There's also an optional extra license but you don't accrue much in the way of added spectrum.
- KirinDave 8y ago
  I am pretty sure you cannot use any of these devices over ham radio.
  - tonyarkles 8y ago
    Command and control you can, but you wouldn’t have the bandwidth for video. Also, no ham radio for commercial purposes.
    - themodelplumber 8y ago
      What about ATV? Seems like those guys have plenty of ham spectrum bandwidth...
      - tonyarkles 8y ago
        ATV is a cool thing! And, thanks to you, I discovered there's more to it than I remembered from when I last read about it. The more common form of Amateur TV is SSTV[0] - Slow-scan TV. This runs in 3kHz (!!!) of bandwidth and typically gets transmitted on voice frequencies, since it can fit inside the max occupied bandwidth there. People transmit this on the HF bands, which can go world-wide! But... for FPV-purposes, it's pretty much useless. You're looking at something like 8-114 seconds/frame. But I had no idea that there's people doing Amateur fast-scan TV[1]. That's pretty cool too! I have no idea how readily available light and portable equipment would be for the 70cm or 33cm bands, but there is a bunch of equipment available for the 23cm (1.2GHz) band. As mentioned in my sibling comment... it's not necessarily legal equipment, and it's kind of just... available... from random distributors in China, but it works OK and you're not all that likely to have someone complain about it in that band, unless you happen to be interfering with their attempts to do the same thing :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_television https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_television
pascalxus 8y ago
Correct me if i'm wrong, but I thought it was illegal to do this in the US: at least if you want to do it with commercial purposes. Make stuff illegal, and it won't happen. simple as that.
- KirinDave 8y ago
  You do have to negotiate with the federal government for any serious business plan. This is true of pretty much all transit and shipping companies historically. In reality, the space isn't very well regulated. Not unlike Financial technology, there's a ton of room for startups to come and start disrupting traditional businesses. the overhead for entering into any of the pulley to find spaces where regulation is it play, is to make sure that you have lawyers who understand the issues on staff.
mrpollo 8y ago
The technology has certainly reached a point where you can quickly put product prototypes together, the current regulations around the world finally allow for commercial use of drones, companies are beginning to invest more in the many drone verticals (some of which are still being defined, like delivery), and communities are being formed to host industry collaboration, I think this is a great time for the "Drone industry" regardless fo where you are. I work for the Linux Foundation, I'm the Program Manager for Dronecode (dronecode.org), we host some of the most successful open source drone projects and give companies a vendor-neutral governance where they can freely collaborate. At our core, the project that runs this community is our autopilot, PX4, the project was started 10 years ago in a lab at (surprise) ETH Zurich by (now Ph.D.) @LorenzMeier (Github), the autopilot is being used in some of the products you see every day, has an ecosystem of tools, all of which is actively being maintained. You can find more info on the autopilot on px4.io To @KirinDave point, yes this technology is available and you can start working on Drones now, the Drone community is very welcoming, I think its a side effect of having to apply technology from other communities, like computer vision. https://www.dronecode.org/ https://www.dronecode.org/ https://github.com/LorenzMeier https://github.com/LorenzMeier http://px4.io/ http://px4.io/
ucaetano 8y ago
> But there is nothing magical or special about Switzerland other than a concentration of interest. That is called clustering, and it is very, very hard to build and disrupt. It took Silicon Valley almost 100 years to build its own. Why do you think Switzerland is such a global leader in precision machinery and manufacturing? Yep, 150 years of watchmaking. You don't make that up out of nowhere.
- l9k 8y ago
  It's not an uncommon tactic. The IoT Valley tries this kind of clustering project for Internet of Things startups: https://www.iot-valley.fr/eng https://www.iot-valley.fr/eng
- servs 8y ago
  Despite Switzerland's reputation, and even arguably better conditions, relatively similar countries like Israel and Sweden have been running laps around Switzerland in the last 20 years when it comes to startups (possibly excluding pharmaceuticals). It might be, but I don't see why it would be different this time.
  - ucaetano 8y ago
    Sure (debatable, actually), and what's your point? Many countries have been running laps around other countries in many industries, what does it have to do with clusters?
    - servs 8y ago
      You are saying that it is special because of the clustering, so I am wondering what indicates that? If you look at Sweden or Israel it is fairly obvious that they are successful in at least half a dozen areas. You can trace the path from one area or company to the next. In Sweden Markus Persson who made Minecraft used to work at King. Jacob de Geer of iZettle was the first employee at TradeDoubler, which was founded by Martin Lorentzon who would later be a founder of Spotify. Daniel Ek of Spotify used to work at another gaming company and of course the music industry is large in general. Zennström who started Skype used to work at Tele2, a telecom operator. Klarna was started with help from people from Bluetail, which used Erlang in turn made by Ericsson. Etc. Etc. (This is just off the top of my head and all these companies had large exits or were already established). That is what a successful cluster is and what makes them hard to replicate. Without this dynamic it is just a bunch of companies next to each other. So why doesn't Switzerland seem to have that?
DrNuke 8y ago
For safety before flight, we at DronesBench http://www.dronesbench.it/en http://www.dronesbench.it/en have devised and validated academically a single electro-mechanical parameter for the drone as a whole. If written on the plate at factory or just sticked somewhere on the frame, it would make testing extremely inexpensive through its entire operational life. Incidentally (shameless plug!), we are exhibiting at The Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas on Oct 1-3 with an eye to the STEM educational market worldwide.
- abstractbeliefs 8y ago
  A single parameter to benchmark seems like quite a big statement, given how varied the use cases are. Perhaps you can tell us more about it, and why it's a worthwhile measure?
  - DrNuke 8y ago
    Sure, that’s a quick presentation with the relevant academic references http://www.dronesbench.it/en/fomdrone/ http://www.dronesbench.it/en/fomdrone/ . Our testing machines implementing that concept are not good enough for commercial purposes yet (the system is dynamic and some unavoidable interferences occur) but we are doing industrialisation tests in order to bring the statistical error on measurements below 3% and hopefully below 1% soon.
Leherenn 8y ago
The Wingtra in the article is a VTOL fixed wing, not as easy to do as a quad. The other main drone from Switzerland is senseFly's eBee, again a fixed-wing mostly for photogrammetry. The drone in a cage they talk about is I think flyability's. All of those are drones for professional applications, not for hobbyists. That market is pretty much cornered: wants nice videos/pictures -> DJI, a racing quad or just to pilot -> go custom/cheap Chinese. In all of those cases, the value is either in software/product behind the drone where the hardware is just a platform, or something quite custom for a specific application. As you said, you can't compete with the Chinese for generic hardware, as Intel, Parrot and others discovered.
- KirinDave 8y ago
  Sure, but fixed wing drones are even easier to build, fly and (modulo the landing bits) land than quads. Even independent small shops are designing and shipping recreational performance fixed wing drones reusing drone parts (BlackSheep's Caipirinha 2 comes to mind: https://team-blacksheep.com/products/prod:tbs_caipi2_kit https://team-blacksheep.com/products/prod:tbs_caipi2_kit). Quads just have the ability to hover, which is desirable in a lot of industrial applications. They're also a nice example here because they have the most expensive avionics software and hardware (clock speeds have hard minimums) and THEY are cheap.

polskibus 8y ago

What parts would you recommend to build a drone that's on par with mavic air ( incl. Gimbal)?

KirinDave 8y ago
I'd recommend going to the youtube Channels Rotor Riot and UAV Futures (and possibly Mr. Steele) if you want to get a nice series of well-sourced introductory materials by veteran professional drone operators. I'm by far an amateur, and don't really have enough sim hours to fly the drone I'm just about done assembling. But: the aerial camera gimbal is by far the hardest part to get right, and why vendors like DJI charge what they charge. Software exists to make it work, though.
natvert 8y ago
If you want a mavic, just buy a mavic, building something with this level quality / reliability is not worth the effort. The advantage to building your own is that you get a different type of quad -- a racing quad which feels more like flying a porsche (feels like a race car) than an mini-van (e.g. mavic, reliable but super fun to fly). If you want to build a racer, rctimer has some of the best kits (high quality parts, well thought out design). Here's an old build guide from my blog, you would want to get a newer kit with an omnibus-based flight controller, but the idea is the same: https://nathan.vertile.com/blog/2016/04/24/rctimer-u210-mini-quad-build-setup-and-review/ https://nathan.vertile.com/blog/2016/04/24/rctimer-u210-mini... Also, if you're just learning to fly, you probably want to learn acro/rate mode (which is full manual mode) on something smaller first, like this maybe: https://nathan.vertile.com/blog/2017/03/31/betaflight-micro-brushless-aurora-100/ https://nathan.vertile.com/blog/2017/03/31/betaflight-micro-...

mc32 8y ago

Do you know off hand if the toy copter cos are looking to take advantage of the affordability of this kind of tech, or are thry just too old fashioned to care?

KirinDave 8y ago
You can absolutely buy a tinywhoop or something like that. You can even wire them for FPV, which is a cool way to experience life in your house as a fly. But the prices aren't just affecting the floor models. DJI's had to move into the $300 range (I literally just bought one) because of steep competition in small shops making custom drones and other vendors pushing the cost down as various manufacturing houses spin up.
- mc32 8y ago
  The Cheapest one I saw was the Spark at 399 --looks great but looks like best experience would require doubling that for the goggles as well. Still; looks enticing!

Matthias247 8y ago

> But there is nothing magical or special about Switzerland other than a concentration of interest. You could say similar things about Silicon Valley. And yet most people agree that it’s a super important place for all tech stuff. So it seems to be a very relevant factor.

tnecniv 8y ago
That area is pretty tech oriented and there are a number of research groups in at ETHZ that work with drone platforms exclusively. It's no accident that the Valley is next to a group of strong universities.
servs 8y ago
I wouldn't say so. SV has always had quite specific points that, for a lot of people, made it more appealing than the alternatives. There are a number of technology "interested" areas in the US including Dallas, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, New York and a lot more "lesser" ones that aren't SV.
Annatar 8y ago
Having lived in Silicon Valley, there is one magical thing: climate. It is warm year-round; Spring comes in January; You can go surf in the morning, go to work, and ski in the evening. Did I mention afternoons with 23 - 25 degrees Celsius in January?

escherplex 8y ago

These things are fun to toy with. For greater transmit power (and a slew of frequencies to experiment with) I'd suggest getting a US general ham radio license, which are relatively easy to acquire. There's also an optional extra license but you don't accrue much in the way of added spectrum.

KirinDave 8y ago
I am pretty sure you cannot use any of these devices over ham radio.
- tonyarkles 8y ago
  Command and control you can, but you wouldn’t have the bandwidth for video. Also, no ham radio for commercial purposes.
  - themodelplumber 8y ago
    What about ATV? Seems like those guys have plenty of ham spectrum bandwidth...
    - tonyarkles 8y ago
      ATV is a cool thing! And, thanks to you, I discovered there's more to it than I remembered from when I last read about it. The more common form of Amateur TV is SSTV[0] - Slow-scan TV. This runs in 3kHz (!!!) of bandwidth and typically gets transmitted on voice frequencies, since it can fit inside the max occupied bandwidth there. People transmit this on the HF bands, which can go world-wide! But... for FPV-purposes, it's pretty much useless. You're looking at something like 8-114 seconds/frame. But I had no idea that there's people doing Amateur fast-scan TV[1]. That's pretty cool too! I have no idea how readily available light and portable equipment would be for the 70cm or 33cm bands, but there is a bunch of equipment available for the 23cm (1.2GHz) band. As mentioned in my sibling comment... it's not necessarily legal equipment, and it's kind of just... available... from random distributors in China, but it works OK and you're not all that likely to have someone complain about it in that band, unless you happen to be interfering with their attempts to do the same thing :) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow-scan_television [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_television https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amateur_television

pascalxus 8y ago

Correct me if i'm wrong, but I thought it was illegal to do this in the US: at least if you want to do it with commercial purposes. Make stuff illegal, and it won't happen. simple as that.

KirinDave 8y ago
You do have to negotiate with the federal government for any serious business plan. This is true of pretty much all transit and shipping companies historically. In reality, the space isn't very well regulated. Not unlike Financial technology, there's a ton of room for startups to come and start disrupting traditional businesses. the overhead for entering into any of the pulley to find spaces where regulation is it play, is to make sure that you have lawyers who understand the issues on staff.

mrpollo 8y ago

The technology has certainly reached a point where you can quickly put product prototypes together, the current regulations around the world finally allow for commercial use of drones, companies are beginning to invest more in the many drone verticals (some of which are still being defined, like delivery), and communities are being formed to host industry collaboration, I think this is a great time for the "Drone industry" regardless fo where you are. I work for the Linux Foundation, I'm the Program Manager for Dronecode (dronecode.org), we host some of the most successful open source drone projects and give companies a vendor-neutral governance where they can freely collaborate. At our core, the project that runs this community is our autopilot, PX4, the project was started 10 years ago in a lab at (surprise) ETH Zurich by (now Ph.D.) @LorenzMeier (Github), the autopilot is being used in some of the products you see every day, has an ecosystem of tools, all of which is actively being maintained. You can find more info on the autopilot on px4.io To @KirinDave point, yes this technology is available and you can start working on Drones now, the Drone community is very welcoming, I think its a side effect of having to apply technology from other communities, like computer vision. https://www.dronecode.org/ https://www.dronecode.org/ https://github.com/LorenzMeier https://github.com/LorenzMeier http://px4.io/ http://px4.io/

ucaetano 8y ago

> But there is nothing magical or special about Switzerland other than a concentration of interest. That is called clustering, and it is very, very hard to build and disrupt. It took Silicon Valley almost 100 years to build its own. Why do you think Switzerland is such a global leader in precision machinery and manufacturing? Yep, 150 years of watchmaking. You don't make that up out of nowhere.

l9k 8y ago
It's not an uncommon tactic. The IoT Valley tries this kind of clustering project for Internet of Things startups: https://www.iot-valley.fr/eng https://www.iot-valley.fr/eng
servs 8y ago
Despite Switzerland's reputation, and even arguably better conditions, relatively similar countries like Israel and Sweden have been running laps around Switzerland in the last 20 years when it comes to startups (possibly excluding pharmaceuticals). It might be, but I don't see why it would be different this time.
- ucaetano 8y ago
  Sure (debatable, actually), and what's your point? Many countries have been running laps around other countries in many industries, what does it have to do with clusters?
  - servs 8y ago
    You are saying that it is special because of the clustering, so I am wondering what indicates that? If you look at Sweden or Israel it is fairly obvious that they are successful in at least half a dozen areas. You can trace the path from one area or company to the next. In Sweden Markus Persson who made Minecraft used to work at King. Jacob de Geer of iZettle was the first employee at TradeDoubler, which was founded by Martin Lorentzon who would later be a founder of Spotify. Daniel Ek of Spotify used to work at another gaming company and of course the music industry is large in general. Zennström who started Skype used to work at Tele2, a telecom operator. Klarna was started with help from people from Bluetail, which used Erlang in turn made by Ericsson. Etc. Etc. (This is just off the top of my head and all these companies had large exits or were already established). That is what a successful cluster is and what makes them hard to replicate. Without this dynamic it is just a bunch of companies next to each other. So why doesn't Switzerland seem to have that?

DrNuke 8y ago

For safety before flight, we at DronesBench http://www.dronesbench.it/en http://www.dronesbench.it/en have devised and validated academically a single electro-mechanical parameter for the drone as a whole. If written on the plate at factory or just sticked somewhere on the frame, it would make testing extremely inexpensive through its entire operational life. Incidentally (shameless plug!), we are exhibiting at The Commercial UAV Expo in Las Vegas on Oct 1-3 with an eye to the STEM educational market worldwide.

abstractbeliefs 8y ago
A single parameter to benchmark seems like quite a big statement, given how varied the use cases are. Perhaps you can tell us more about it, and why it's a worthwhile measure?
- DrNuke 8y ago
  Sure, that’s a quick presentation with the relevant academic references http://www.dronesbench.it/en/fomdrone/ http://www.dronesbench.it/en/fomdrone/ . Our testing machines implementing that concept are not good enough for commercial purposes yet (the system is dynamic and some unavoidable interferences occur) but we are doing industrialisation tests in order to bring the statistical error on measurements below 3% and hopefully below 1% soon.

Leherenn 8y ago

The Wingtra in the article is a VTOL fixed wing, not as easy to do as a quad. The other main drone from Switzerland is senseFly's eBee, again a fixed-wing mostly for photogrammetry. The drone in a cage they talk about is I think flyability's. All of those are drones for professional applications, not for hobbyists. That market is pretty much cornered: wants nice videos/pictures -> DJI, a racing quad or just to pilot -> go custom/cheap Chinese. In all of those cases, the value is either in software/product behind the drone where the hardware is just a platform, or something quite custom for a specific application. As you said, you can't compete with the Chinese for generic hardware, as Intel, Parrot and others discovered.

KirinDave 8y ago
Sure, but fixed wing drones are even easier to build, fly and (modulo the landing bits) land than quads. Even independent small shops are designing and shipping recreational performance fixed wing drones reusing drone parts (BlackSheep's Caipirinha 2 comes to mind: https://team-blacksheep.com/products/prod:tbs_caipi2_kit https://team-blacksheep.com/products/prod:tbs_caipi2_kit). Quads just have the ability to hover, which is desirable in a lot of industrial applications. They're also a nice example here because they have the most expensive avionics software and hardware (clock speeds have hard minimums) and THEY are cheap.