Inside Chris Anderson's Open-Source Drone Factory 56
the_newsbeagle writes "The former editor of Wired is betting that the 21st century skies will be filled with drones, and not the military sort. His company, 3D Robotics, is building open-source UAVs for the civilian market, and expects its drones to catch on first in agriculture. As noted in an article about the company's grand ambitions: 'Farms are far from the city's madding crowds and so offer safe flying areas; also, the trend toward precision agriculture demands aerial monitoring of crops. Like traffic watching, it's a job tailor-made for a robot: dull, dirty, and dangerous.' Also, farmers apparently wouldn't need FAA approval for privately owned drones flying over their own property."
As a customer, fuck 3d robotics. (Score:5, Informative)
His factory is a joke.
They don't ship product on time, they claim to have shipped things they don't, and they pretty much lie at every turn when you deal with their customer support. Their website claims items in stock that aren't, and claims items out of stock that get shipped.
I made repeated calls and met with repeated lies.
This pattern is repeated time and time again by others than myself on their forums.
When you want to actually get your product you have to post a rant online on their forms, twitter and other social media sites ... then all of the sudden, mysteriously your package will be shipped with stuff they said they wouldn't have for a week ... of course this is already 2 weeks after they claimed to have shipped it over night ... given you a tracking number that still claims FedEx hasn't been picked up.
I eventually got my package about 3 weeks after placing an over nighted order for things the website (AND customer support by phone) claimed they had in stock. Even FedEx seemed a little irate that I'd been giving a tracking number for an overnight package that was entered in their system for pickup and hadn't been picked up in 2 weeks when I spoke to them.
Chris Anderson is a blowhard loud mouth that has almost nothing at all to do with 3d robotics other than his name, and thats a good thing, cause its a shitty company that appropriated GPL'd code for its own profit, which would be fine, if it weren't such a shitty company.
He's just riding on other peoples work like he does everywhere. He has basically no actual involvement with the company other than claiming CEO and using his name to drum up investment funding for his coffers. Half the time it doesn't even appear that he knows what his company actually does, and I doubt for an instant that he's ever held the controls of one of his drones.
Fuck 3d robotics and Chris Anderson, its a horrible company to do business with and deserves to die a painful death. Stay far far away.
ArduPilot rocks. 3d Robotics sucks ass in every conceivable way.