CyPhy LVL 1 Drone

2015-06-15 01:07:04 -0400

I backed the CyPhy LVL 1 Drone with 9 days to go. This led to me thinking a little about my overall kickstarter backing (138 projects in, this was a bit of long-overdue mindfulness.)

Too Many Kicks

I'd been stalling on it for a variety of reasons:

• I already have an original Parrot AR.Drone that got a bunch of use when I first started but has since languished - it's even relatively open internally, but I never got good enough at flying it to use it for anything (and the battery life was really short - it could really use a roomba-style charging cradle, especially given smart auto-landing.)
• I've got an entire cabinet of unused kickstarter projects - to be fair, many of them were "I want to support that hardware coming into existance" (like the microPython boards, which have inspired follow-on kickstarters including a board that ships with OpenCV and a camera built-in), some of them were "that's so cute and it's cheap enough that I don't even care if I don't have an obvious use" (like the smaller-than-a-quarter arduino-clone with motor-driver boards.)
• Most of the things I'd want to do with a drone are more effectively accomplished by convincing the friends of mine who are truly enthusiastic and have much better equipment (Hi Chris and Keith :-)
• I'm not quite on-board with the idea that pictures taken from a drone meet my strict definition of photography (specifically "what I consider my hobby of photography"), especially if they're slices clipped out of stabilized video streams.

New (personal) rules for backing kickstarters

I finally concluded that I could self-justify a lot better with a few constraints:

• Any pledge over $100 needs to have a blog post explaining in advance why I'm backing it. (Note that the excuses don't have to be good ones, I just have to write them down...)
• I'll make a (probably unnecessary) exception for input-device-related kickstarters, simply because I've already established myself as a keyboard collector and an enthusiastic "part of the problem".
• I'll also make an exception for webcomic kickstarters (I'd say "art" kickstarters in general, but really I've only done maybe three or four outside the webcomic space.) Somewhat redundant because those don't tend to run expensive either, but also because I'm usually doing it to support artists that I've read for years, more than to get an Actual Thing out of it (though the production quality of book editions of webcomics tends to be impressively high.) (ps. I'd love to see Jon Kilgannon do a kickstarter to get Volume 2 of A Miracle of Science out the door, Volume 1 is getting lonely!)

The CyPhy Drone itself

Given all that, why am I getting a LVL 1?

• The flight UI should show generations of improvement, so my issues with the difficulty of drone flying should be much reduced
• The LVL 1 UI in particular is designed around photography
• It looks like the LVL 1 is well capable of outdoor flight, so using it for a house (roof-and-chimney) survey seems entirely plausible as a first-flight project, or close to it
• Given my justifications for using it, the next question is what kind of credibility the company has - in this case, I've been stalking, err, "collecting competitive intelligence on" the company for years, because they're one of the interesting and notable non-Google robot companies in the Boston area and I've been planning a career change for a while (a jump I have in fact made, but to an entirely different part of the robotics industry.)
• Helen Greiner is awesome :)
• Even without that, it's clearly a production-grade device from a company that already has small-run hardware in production.

I'm hoping to see what kind of model building is practical to do based on taking the video stream and doing pose-recovery and then modeling and texture-mapping; I'm not actually looking for an architectural model, but enough of a model to "look good in 3d" and maybe to calculate sunlight exposure of different parts of the yard in order to plant more flowers.

I also know more about drones at this point, so it's a more informed choice than the original Parrot was.

(3 days to go, and they've got almost 3x the original funding target...)