Why This Project Began

We are both very driven engineers - one with a background heavier in programming and the other with a background heavier in physics. Because most drones on the market are priced towards what you might call the "pro-sumer", we set out to develop a new drone with advanced features priced down more to the "consumer" level. In particular, we hope to address one of the major shortcomings in the "consumer" market for UAV's, flight time, and bring some pro-sumer level functions down to that price point too. We hope to build a drone at a consumer price point with a much longer flight time than the average and, though we do not plan to include the most expansive functions in our first UAV build, we do hope to include some very useful backbone functions like return-to-home and intelligent orientation control. (Both of these functions should arguably be included on all UAV's capable of longer flight times to ensure public safety and fun for the user!)

One of the major themes behind this project is to empower and encourage the consumer/hobby drone market by developing models and/or methods that can be used and refined. We see two ways to design a drone - the "guess and check approach" which may be too prevelant in hobby builds and the "design and validate" approach which is broadly what engineers do. We tightly hold to the latter for two reasons: safety and quality. The former sacrifices both. Given that there is no one point of information on how to build a quadcopter with the level of detail we desired, we set out to compile the models and methods necessary ourselves. We sought not just to purchase off-the-shelf parts along with their recommended counterparts but to rather design the quadcopter from the ground up to enable us to understand its function deeply and optimize its performance. While we have benefited from our design approach already in the building and flying of our quadcopter, we hope that this website in particular will empower others to "go deeper" in their designs and design like engineers even if that isn't their day job or field of study.

We would like to quickly remind our readers that there are some inherent dangers to UAV's and that building a UAV without properly designing it can put the user and others in the vicinity of the UAV at risk.

In conclusion, we hope this project will be helpful to a range of people from the person who knows little of drones or physics to the person with a pretty firm grasp looking to validate his work by comparison. We hope this project will be a step forward and have decided to publish our work here so that our final product will not be just a UAV, but a design process others can follow and refine. What started out as essentially a dream to achieve flight on our own in a very thorough, honest way has become a project we would like to share with others. We hope not to make just a toy, but an innovation.