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.
Great way to get kids into the awesome hobby of flight without breaking the bank (or the equipment). FPV is even more engrossing and way more fun than video games :) What flight controller are these running? @cholly@rwalters
@davidsfeng We wrote our own flight controller building on other open source projects like MultiWii and Cleanflight. You can check out our code at http://flybrix.com/github.
Super excited to share our product with the world today and to be featured here on Product Hunt. Amir, Holly, and I will be around most of today if anybody has questions we can answer.
Cool! For a noob, how long does it take to go from box-open to flight?
I guess I'd be worried about crashing and losing important pieces in my design. Do you sell packs of spare parts/bricks?
What's the relationship with LEGO, if any?
How many times have you barefoot-stepped on a lego piece, Amir? 😵
@istanb4u Hi Ian -- thanks for the great questions!
1. Box to Flying
We think most customers should be airborne with the quad model in about 15 minutes. The octocopter model is a bit more complicated and probably takes about 20 minutes to build. I can put one together in about 5 minutes, but I'm sure it could be done faster. Maybe someday we'll host a speed-building event and get the definitive answer. (Have you ever gone deep on speed cubing? There are some insanely fast people out there.)
2. Spare parts
We sell spare parts on our website. You can also buy bricks directly from the LEGO website or on reseller sites like BrickLink and BrickOwl.
3. Relationship with LEGO
We love LEGO's products and we're being super careful to respect their trademarks.
4. Barefoot bricks
OSHA actually requires steel toed footwear in facilities that process LEGO bricks.
@chclteteacher I'm really excited about the possibilities here. I want to make a rolling cart that can be used to teach a complete drone enrichment program -- but we need to include things like a teacher's app that provides an overview of each active drone in the classroom, a charger for 30 batteries, packaging (lunchbox style?) that makes it easy to put away the drones, and of course, a lot more curriculum than we have right now. We also need to work more on "geofencing" kids into a 1x1x2m flight volume and finish up the Scratch integration. There are so many great engineering concepts that can be taught with Flybrix! Programming too -- I've started working on a guidebook at http://flybrix.com/textbook.
One other thing to note is that our flightboard is basically a superset of some sensor kit products that are out there. We can include a couple of special bricks someday that let students use Flybrix for experiments that are pretty far away from drones or robotics. For example, you could put the flightboard inside of a balloon, blow it up and use the onboard barometer and thermometer to study gas laws.
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