How I Accidentally Kickstarted the Domestic Drone Boom

But would we ever have actually had the Internet before DARPA? It took over 30 years before the Internet actually became a mainstream and profitable thing. If the net had been developed by private companies then they would have done it in such a way that would have let them become profitable within a year or two, so it's unlikely that the net would be anything like what it is today. And for all it's flaws, it's hard to imagine it being better if it were developed by private industry.

which model is he talking about? i got curious and went looking, and the best i could find was $50

A few years back when there was really only one prominent open source UAV system (Paparazzi), nearly everyone was focused on turning (fixed-wing) radio-controlled planes into hobby UAVs. Back then we didn't have gyros or accelerometers, we used thermopiles to detect the heat difference between warm ground and the cold atmosphere on four axis. This worked well until it became night time or started raining, and required a baseline calibration before most flights.

When projects like OpenPilot and Ardupilot (aka. DIYDrones/3DRobotics) first started to appear they were focused on building UAV systems for planes with this same technology, multi-rotor vehicles where only just on the radar at that stage. They were expensive and to be frank, not very good at flying stable. Then game consoles like the Wii came along and over the next few years gyros and accelerometers started to become much cheaper.

OpenPilot and DIYDrones/3DRobotics initially started out developing with these new gyros and accelerometers in planes, but it wasn't really the right platform as planes tend to me more costly and fragile in a crash, which is inevitable when developing with these new technologies. OpenPilot initially started to adapt their system to multi-rotors (aka. quadcopters) as a way of quickly testing new code and new algorithms for planes. Unlike planes we could even now test code indoors.

Quad-copters started out as a utility, to lift heavy items or as a test-bed for fixed-win UAV algorithms. From there they have now become the first class citizen in the world of open source and hobby UAV projects.

I think this is all really just starting to ramp up. The hardware we need to build these systems is pretty much all there, it can get faster, smaller and cheaper but innovation there is nearing a plateau. On the other hand, I think software is still very much in it's infancy. There is still a long way to go in making these systems reliable and repeatable, and most importantly user friendly. We have progressed from having to re-compile under linux to change one PID setting value, but the barrier to entry is still quite high on the technical side of things.

Disclaimer: Co-Founder of the OpenPilot project.