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on May 18
The Quadshot Team
Posted project update #18Foam parts are done!
Hey all,
Great news: As you can tell from the title, THE FOAM PARTS ARE DONE!!!! Here they are packed into boxes and ready to hop into a container destined for the Port of Oakland!In other news, the AMGEN Tour of California bicycle race rolled through Bonny Doon, right past our office. We used a GoPro-equipped Quadshot to take some aerial footage of the cyclists going by. No stunts like chasing after them though - we didn’t want anyone reporting UFO sightings :-P
Lastly, we’re bringing a couple Quadshot prototypes to the Maker Faire Bay Area in San Mateo, CA this weekend, so if you’ll be there, keep an eye on our twitter feed (@thequadshot) to see where we are!
Cheers,
-- The Quadshot team: Piotr, Chris, Pranay, and Jeff.
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on May 14
The Quadshot Team
Posted project update #17Foam is go!
Update time again, and we’ll keep it short and sweet:
Fourth time’s the charm! (For foam at least)
We’re happy to announce we’ve approved the foam tooling! It took almost five months and three rounds of test shots, but the results look great and we feel it’s been worth the wait. Production all the foam parts (wings, winglets, pylons, and spar covers) has been kicked off and will take about a week. Chris also had a cool idea to add some pieces that let you keep radio RX bays you’re not using covered for a cleaner look and better aero:
Batteries and chargers? Check and check.
We’ve done a bunch of testing and picked a good supplier for both. They’re ready to ship out with the foam.
Wires? Double check.
The various wire assemblies to connect LEDs, the RC receiver, and battery to Lisa/Lia are being made now and will either ship over in the container with everything else, or arrive on a FedEx magic carpet.
Lia? Check check check.
Many of you (well, seven) replied to our last update, and in a landslide (with three votes!) is black boards with white text - the same as Lisa/M. Piotr is wearing all black to celebrate. PCBs are ordered and will be here in about 10 days. The microcontrollers and electronic components are already here, so Lia will go into assembly as soon as the boards arrive. We’ll assemble the second batch of Aspirin IMUs at the same time.
And most importantly, a ship date! As in, on a ship!The biggest news is that assuming all goes well with the foam, our shipping container will be packed on May 25th and leave the port of Shenzhen on May 28th. ETA in Oakland, CA is on or about June 10, and following unloading, customs, and the truck ride to us in Santa Cruz, we should have everything on or about June 13.
We therefore estimate that kits (Lattes, Cappuccinos, and Espressos), will begin to ship out the week of June 18-22, followed by Kopi Luwaks, followed by Mochas. We will publish more frequent short updates from here on out to keep everyone up-to-date.
THANK YOU again for your patience, we are just as excited as you are!-- The Quadshot team: Jeff, Pranay, Piotr, and Chris.
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on March 26
The Quadshot Team
Posted project update #16Production Update
Hello all,
It’s about time for another update on our progress towards getting you your Quadshots!
Foam Molding: First and Second Shots
As we said in our last update, the foam ‘first shots’ (first test parts out of the molds) were originally scheduled to be completed February 20th, but the mold tooling company encountered some delays and took almost two extra weeks. On March 3rd (Jeff’s last full day in China) the molds had made it to the molding company and been mounted into the molding machine, and Jeff went to see the first shots get made:
First shots are all about finding and fixing the issues that inevitably crop up, and for us it seems that most issues relate to the placement of the ‘gates,’ or inlet nozzles where the foam beads are injected into the molds. Gate placement is more art than science, and poor gate placement means either the parts won’t fill completely full of foam, or that they require cramming a lot of beads in - which results in a heavy part.
Here’s a first shot of the port wing, and you can see that the center part of the leading edge (where it would wrap around the electronics box) didn’t fill, resulting in a missing chunk of wing:
Also, this gate needs to be recessed so that flash (extra material) doesn’t block the end of the spar channel:
And here’s something that needs a design tweak: the foam near the pylon landing foot gets too thin, causing the beads to sometimes fail to knit together over the plastic skeleton:
Note that all the parts that you have seen so far are made out of Expanded Polyolefin (EPO) foam, not Expanded Polypropylene (EPP). EPO is also commonly used in RC aircraft and is better for first shots because it molds with a much shinier, smoother finish, which allows you to see small surface flaws in the molds. Also, EPO beads can be molded without any preparation, and don’t require any post-curing - as soon as they pop out of the machine, they’re done. On the other hand, EPP beads have to be steamed for 24 hours prior to molding to pre-expand them and then allowed to cure for another 12 hours afterwards. The molding company had planned on making some first shots from EPP, but their power was turned off in the middle of the night, ruining the beads they had pre-expanding.
Despite the gate placement issues, they were able to make us five or so complete EPO foam sets, which Jeff brought back to the US. Chris assembled one set into a complete vehicle:
We can’t tell you how exciting it is to finally have a fully-molded Quadshot! We can’t wait for all of you to have yours too :-)
As Jeff flew back to the US, the mold tools went back to the tooling company, where they added some gates, moved others, and fixed some places where the cavity shape was not correct. Jeff also added a slight swell to the pylon near the foot to give the foam enough room. After about a week they were done with the changes, and the molding company made a set of new shots:
The gates are in better places now, so they didn’t have to stuff the molds full of beads to get the parts to fill, which means these parts are about 20% lighter than the first shots.The molding company also made some shots from EPP in this second round:
As you can see, they did not come out well - EPP is more finicky about the mold and gate setup, and more susceptible to deforming after it is removed from the molds.
Switching to EPO
This brings us to an important announcement, which is that after consulting with the molding company, testing both EPP and EPO, and discussing amongst ourselves we have decided to use EPO as the construction material instead of EPP.We are changing to EPO for a variety of reasons. We initially selected EPP for its resilience – EPP foam doesn’t ‘crush’ when squeezed, for example – but we have learned that EPO has many advantages that we feel make it the better overall material:
- As you can see in the photos, EPO has a much better surface finish than even perfectly molded EPP, meaning a glossier, more aerodynamic (and prettier!) Quadshot.
- EPO does not ‘relax’ and deform like EPP can when exposed to the elevated temperatures common in car trunks and shipping containers.
- EPP is molded at a higher temperature than EPO, so the plastic skeletons are more susceptible to being deformed by the foam beads pushing past them in the molding process.
- EPO is compatible with a wider range of glues and paints, both of which are important to building, repairing, and hacking the Quadshot.
- EPO is stiffer at the same density – meaning that the airframe will react faster to quick changes in direction.
Another important benefit is that EPO will allow us to deliver your Quadshots more quickly - from what we have seen, each mold tooling revision requires between one and two weeks, and getting EPP to mold correctly would likely take multiple further revisions. With EPO, we only need to do one revision to adjust the elevon hinge thickness before we can start production. Lastly, because EPO does not require any pre-expansion or post-curing, the molding company will take less time to manufacture all of the foam sets.
If you have any questions or comments about all of this, please post them in our forum!
Aspirin v2.1
The first production run of the brand new Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) that will provide sensor data to your Quadshots is complete. The assembly was carried out by our electronics assembly partners, Dallas Electronics, Santa Cruz. Here they are all assembled and tested and waiting for their new homes on Lisas:They have the super-awesome, brand new InvenSense IMU-6000 on them, which combines 3 accelerometers and 3 gyroscopes into a single chip. The chip can run its measurements through an internal Kalman filter to provide low-noise output, or give you the raw measurements at higher rates.
LED Boards:
We received all of the PCBs for the LED boards (the square ones on top) and the LED driver boards (skinny ones below):Quadshots get four LED boards, each with two LEDs on it (either a pair of red or green, or one blue and one white). The driver board takes input from Lisa or Lia and drives all the LEDs with a small FET, which lets us command them to blink on and off, or even fade in and out. We’ll be assembling all these boards ourselves.
Lia:The prototype Lia boards are both assembled:
They can’t fly until Piotr and Pranay finish the Lisa/M v2 and Aspirin v2.1 software, but once those are done the Lia software should not take long. We’ll kick off production as soon as we’ve test-flown a Quadshot with a Lia and Aspirin v2.1.
Since this has turned into such a long update, we’d like to reward those of you actually still reading - so tell us what color you think the production Lia PCBs should be, and we’ll make the color combo that gets the most votes! Vote for green, matte green, black, matte black, red, blue, orangey-tan, or white boards; and black, yellow, red, or white silkscreened text in the comments!
BatteriesWe’ve been testing many different lithium-polymer batteries, and found that performance doesn’t always correspond to price - for example, the worst (orange) and best (bright green) packs cost almost the same!
We’ve narrowed the potential suppliers down to two and will order them soon.
Motors and Motor Controllers and Propellers, oh my!
Our supplier has finished making all the motors and motor controllers (one of our biggest expenditures yet!), and they are all heading to our cargo company to meet up with the rest of the components, including thousands of propellers, hundreds of radio transmitters, receivers, elevon horns, servo linkages, motor clips, LEDs, and other goodies. Once the foam sets are finished, everything will get loaded into a shipping container for a two-or-three-week hop across the Pacific to us, so that we can start getting them to you! We can’t wait, and we know you can’t either - so THANK YOU again for your patience with us as we pull all the pieces together :-)
As always, we hope you’ll join in on the forum at http://forum.thequadshot.com, or chat with us on the IRC channel #quadshot on the freenode network - if you have a question just look for Piotr’s handle, ‘esden’ (if you don’t have an IRC client set up you can use a web client too).Cheers,
Pranay, Chris, Jeff, and Piotr3 of 7View Previous Comments-
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Dave Gilbert on April 6
Love these updates! You guys rock! Black and White sounds awesome but I'm sure I've missed the vote... oh well! Can't wait to fly this thing!
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on February 25
The Quadshot Team
Posted project update #15Production has Started!
Hello all,
We’ve had an incredibly busy few weeks, with production runs on your Quadshots finally under way! We received all the plastic parts from our US based plastics supplier, and here are the boxes with enough plastic parts for 400 Quadshots:
The new and (post the prototype run we mentioned in the last update) slightly improved electronics box:
Brand new off the molds!
And 1600 ABS-PC pylon skeletons:
The Lisa/Ms for the Espresso level awards also ran through their production run for the Kickstarter deliveries. Here we see them being assembled at Dallas Electronics, our Santa Cruz based PCB assembly providers.
Adding solder paste using an aluminium stencil:
Pick and place robot moving the components from reels onto the board:
Coming out of the reflow oven:
Lined up after the bake (a bunch of tasty fresh crispy Lisa/Ms yumm):
One hundred of assembled Lisa/M 2.0s in anti-static bags at our office, ready for QA testing and subsequent Quadshot installation:
Our little jig for testing hundreds of Lisa boards :)
The Lisa/Ls, which power the Kopi Luwaks, are also ready and have undergone QA testing. We also received prototype Lia PCBs for the Mochas:
These will be tested for bugs and sent off for their production runs shortly. The full run of the next generation Aspirin IMU v2.1 PCBs is also due to come in next week! Here are the Aspirin v2.1 prototypes we assembled and tested:
Another thing we needed to do was to design a shipping box so that your Quadshots reach you in good condition. Here is the box for the Mochas and Kopi Luwaks (the big Styrofoam box in the center contains the RC transmitter:
…... and here is Jeff drop-testing a box to make sure it can survive the rigors of shipping services!
Jeff went to Shenzhen, China on the 18th, and will go to the EPP foam molding company on Monday to see the ‘first shots’ of wings and pylons to verify their shape, weight, and surface finish. The mold tools were supposed to be ready for first shots on the 20th, but the molding company needed to modify the pylon cavities to correctly hold the plastic skeletons. Jeff also took delivery of 800 servos for the elevons:
and is due to receive the 300 radio transmitters and receivers today. Here’s our prototype with the production labels:
He is also buying off-the-shelf parts (screws, connectors, LEDs, PCB testing gear, etc) and ordering some small custom components (motor clips, servo linkages, etc) at the Shenzhen SEG electronic market.
2400 LEDs and camera screws:
SEG is one of the biggest of its kind in the world - half a dozen huge, 5-10 story buildings crammed full of thousands of factory representatives, vendors, and resellers hawking products made all over China. It’s nuts!
And that’s not all, we have also been making the Quadshot easier to fly and the control software was tweaked to allow the Quadshot to handle mis-aligned motors (such as might occur due to a hasty repair in the field after a hard crash). A rainy day meant flight testing indoors:
It works! See how we cool the cookies Jeff is trying to steal. ;)
Chris has been flying with a GoPro camera a good deal, and we will soon post more videos showing off the improvements in stability and reliability of the system, as well as some exciting on-board video footage!
Thanks again for all your support and patience; we are almost there!
Best,
-tQt.
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Jeremy Snowdon on February 26
Thanks for the news and the pics. Looking forward to more videos, and of course, making some of my own :)
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on February 23
The Quadshot Team
commented on a projectHi, yes an update is due. One just get's lost in work. We are trying to at least have small regular updates on twitter @esden and @thequadshot as well as chrisses blog thing http://forum.thequadshot.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=202&start=40 that you may want to check out. But don't worry, we know a bigger update is due and we will make sure to make one soon. Cheers Piotr and tQt
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on February 1
The Quadshot Team
Posted project update #14Plastics!
We received the first 25 pieces of the electronics enclosures, lids, and pylon ‘skeletons’ from the injection-molding company, and they are beautiful! The rest are in production and will arrive in about 10 days. Check 'em out:
We just had to build a new wing to celebrate:
Chris has been flying whenever the weather cooperates, and it was a beautiful day yesterday so we got out and shot some video that we will post ASAP. As a result of software updates and Pranay’s gain tuning, the Quadshot is flying even more smoothly and stably than before, and we’re also now flying with the radio transmitter and receivers that will ship with the Mochas. In addition, Piotr modified a board (originally designed by members of the Paparazzi community) that should allow any standard six-channel transmitter and receiver to work with the Quadshot.
You may notice in the last photo that Lisa/M looks a bit different - that’s because she is now v2.0 and in Piotr’s favorite color (of course):
We have all the production circuit boards and all 40+ different reels of components, and will drop them off for assembly this week! Our Lia prototype boards will arrive this week as well, and we’ll hand-assemble two or three to verify that everything is correct before we kick off the production boards. The Lisa/L boards for the Kopi Luwaks are all ready and tested.
In the Quadshot photo you can also see a thin board mounted in the bottom center of the enclosure - this allows Lisa to control all eight LEDs on the airframe in unison, for example blinking or fading them in/out to alert you to low battery or other condition.
In other news, the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday ended Monday, so the foam mold manufacturing has resumed. It is still scheduled to be ready for ‘first shots’ in three weeks, so Jeff will be heading back to China to check on them and source the last few small components. He has ordered all of the radio transmitters and receivers, motors, and motor controllers, and will order the servos, carbon spars, and propellers this week.
Thank you again for all of your support and patience. Don’t forget to join our forum at http://forum.thequadshot.com, or if you want to chat, check out the IRC channel #quadshot on the freenode network. If you don’t have an IRC client set up you can use a web client too. The #paparazzi community channel is also on the freenode network. See you there!
Cheers,
Chris, Jeff, Piotr, and Pranay-
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webman on February 6
Thanks for the update!
I love the idea with the power bolt and the little brain ;)
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on December 23
The Quadshot Team
Posted project update #13Lucky 13!
We’re excited to announce that we’ve kicked off production of the two major structural components of the Quadshot, namely the injection mold tooling for the plastic parts (e.g., center electronics box, lids, and reinforcing ‘skeletons’ for the pylons) and the mold tooling for all the EPP foam parts! Huzzah! And there was much rejoicing.
As we said in the previous update, we chose an American plastic injection-molding company that specializes in fast turnaround and runs of less than 10,000 parts, so the mold machining and first sample plastic parts will only take 2 weeks or so to arrive. Once we check that everything looks good, the balance of the parts will follow quickly after. This short turnaround time is critical since the pylon skeletons have to be sent to the EPP molder to be covered in foam. We chose a durable nylon in Piotr’s favorite color* for the box and lids; the pylon skeletons will either be the same color ABS-polycarbonate blend or clear polycarbonate, depending on which has better performance.
We also signed contracts to start machining the mold tools for the EPP foam wing, winglets, and pylons in China. This is a big undertaking, as the EPP mold tool is made of two slabs of sand-cast 750mm x 1250mm (~30”x 49”) alumin(i)um, each of which is fitted with 12 CNC-machined and polished cavities - one for each part. Unfortunately, the tooling company had to increase their turnaround time estimate to 60 days because of both the 2012 new year and lunar new year holidays. However, once the mold tool is done, it should not take very long to mold the parts.
To ease personalization, we went with white EPP foam for all of the parts. We are also happy to announce that the pylons and winglets will be in a higher density grade of foam than the wing, which increases overall durability without adding too much weight.
In other manufacturing news, we now have quotes for nearly all of the nearly 50 other major and minor Quadshot components, and will be placing those orders ASAP so everything is ready to go when the foam parts are done.Finally, we added Quadshots to our web store at http://thequadshot.com to allow pre-orders, which will help us gauge demand and thus order the correct amounts of components going forward. So, if you have friends that missed out on our Kickstarter campaign, please let them know!
Thank you again for all of your generous support and patience. If you have questions or comments please leave them here, or (even better!) post them on the forum at http://forum.thequadshot.com. We are working hard and can’t wait for you to get your Quadshot!
Cheers and happy holidays,
Chris, Jeff, Piotr, and Pranay
* Black, preferably dark black.-
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Garm Beall on December 23
Awesome updates guys, keep it rolling (flying). I'm sending your store link to all my friends.
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on December 5
The Quadshot Team
commented on a project updateAs we mentioned, we hope to press go on the mold production this week. First shot plastic parts take about two weeks. For foam it takes about 40 days. This is the information we have from the manufacturers. After we receive sample parts we will check their quality and if we are happy we will start production, then ship the parts to us for assembly. So we sadly don't have firm dates. But we hope it will be rather 3 months than 6 months. -tQt.
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on December 2
The Quadshot Team
Posted project update #12Small Steps towards the Giant Leap!!
Hello all,
Apologies again for the lack of updates! We are working hard to sort out the little niggles that have to be solved prior to production. We are really learning the 90-90 rule: the first 90% of a project takes 90% of the allotted time, and the last 10% of the project takes the other 90% :-) So here is a list of developments for many of the various elements that go into making the Quadshot:
Legalese
Much as we would prefer to only have to deal with engineering, the unfortunate fact is that we had to spend time doing a lot of legal paperwork in order to get a project of this scale off the ground (so to speak). For example, in order to avoid losing a large chunk of your donations to taxes, we actually needed a corporate bank account, which required us to incorporate a new company (we are now Transition Robotics, Inc.). The paperwork associated with this took an inordinately long time, but as of today, we do finally have access to the funding which you guys generously provided us!
Control Software
We originally wanted to have a battery monitor beeper on the production QSs, but we were concerned it wouldn’t be audible when the QS was flying far and fast in horizontal mode. We have programmed instead a "wing waggle" into the QS where once the battery has reached a critical limit the wings will oscillate in the roll axis every few seconds, telling the pilot it is time to land soon. The oscillations are quick in order to be able to differentiate them from any wind induced vehicle motion, but small enough that there is no loss of control. We tested this in all three modes. Chris’ comment after the test flight was, “I had not witnessed it before but was told what to expect and I noticed it easily without losing any sort of control.” Mission accomplished! This feature will be incorporated in your QSs.
Electronics
Piotr has been revising our electronics and getting them ready for production. He made a a new low profile Aspirin IMU carrier board for Lisa/L, allowing for an easy fit into the avionics box on the QS. The production run for this board is already complete! This is shown below both from a top view and a profile view:
Furthermore, Piotr went through two revisions of the Lisa/M design, solving a large number of issues and adding improvements based on feedback we have received from the Paparazzi community as well as lessons we have learnt in our development and testing process:
- Removed
pull-ups on the USB GPIO.
- Removed
pull-ups on the CAN GPIO.
- Connected USB_VBUS
to PA9 (needed by the USB OTG).
- Removed USB
pull-up transistor as USB OTG has a built-in pull-up.
- Swapped
UART1 with UART3 (UART1 was used for GPS and PA9 was its Tx line, to be able to
talk to the GPS unit UART3 is a better choice, as UART1 only has an Rx line now
it is a better choice for Spektrum RX modules).
- Removed
USART3 Tx GPIO from the GPIO connector and moved to the GPS connector.
- Added
voltage selector jumpers to the RC RX connector; to enable powering of 3v3 or
an 5v receivers.
- Replaced
vertical board solution with through hole servo pin headers (easier assembly).
- Servo
connectors are in groups of two; for easier assembly.
- Servo VBUS
is connected together on all four layers; for lower resistance.
- Moved LED's
from under the analog2 connector; to be able to populate LED's and the
connector.
- Moved the RC
Rx connector a bit; to prevent crashing with the JTAG plug.
- Added one
additional servo connector; now we have all 8 accessible through the standard
servo connectors.
- Added
secondary through hole Picoblade USB connector for easier routing of USB inside
an airframe.
- Lots of
silkscreen improvements.
- Improved
routing to allow tear-dropping improving manufacturability.
- Fixed STM32
F1, F2 and F4 compatibility circuit.
- Connected
existing UART RX pull-ups to the respective connector power pins instead of
3v3. To prevent connecting 5V over IO pin to the 3v3 power rail.
- Added pull-ups
on all UART RX lines to prevent undesired floatation.
- LED's are
connected to 3v3 now. To make sure we don't have an issue with voltage
tolerance on the GPIO pins.
The new Lia PCB for the Mochas is also through its design cycle. Since the Lia is based on the Lisa/M, it was critical to iron out any bugs and make any improvements necessary for the Lisa/M prior to commencing the Lia design process. The PCB order will commence production a few days after the OEM Lisa/M PCBs have been received and tested by us. A screen shot of the finished Lia PCB layout is included below:
Mechanical Design As you may imagine, designing parts for injection molding requires very careful attention to detail. For starters, every vertical surface in a part must be drafted, i.e., at a small angle, instead of being truly vertical. This ensures that parts can be removed from the two mold halves without getting scored, warped, or broken. A complex shape like our avionics box therefore required a lot of work to make it compliant. Just as an example, here is a list of the iterations we had to go through with the plastic molding company prior to converging on workable designs for the box, lids, and pylon ‘skeletons’:
We have also been trying to make the Quadshot easier to pack and transport as well as even more robust to damage on crash landing. To this end, we have created pylons that can be snapped onto the vehicle, allowing it to pack flat during transport. In addition, we hope (and we will continue testing this) that hard landings will cause the pylons to separate, thus absorbing some energy, rather than damaging the entire structure. This necessitated moving to a square spar and changes to the wing and avionics box spar channels. However, we do believe that the effect is well worth the effort.
Prototyping & Flight Testing
Apart from nailing down potential issues in assembly, we have been making our wiring system more robust and resistant to failure. We have also prototyped and flight tested the removable pylons mentioned above. Here is Chris demonstrating how these work, as well as a test flight segment to ensure that the removable pylons do not detach in flight:The last couple of days have also brought high winds to our Bonny Doon area, resulting in loss of electricity, phones, fax and for some really annoying stretches, the internet; but one huge benefit has been ….. wait for it ….. high wind flight testing! We carried out several flights in modes 1 and 2 with vertical take-offs and landings in average winds as high as 12 mph gusting to 30 mph! The Quadshot remained controllable and finished the flight test series without damage. Since winds at altitude were higher than the stall speed, we even had situations where the QS had negative ground speed while maintaining forward flight!
Manufacturing
We are pleased to announce that we are going with a US-based company for the injection-molded plastic parts. We hope to pull the trigger on production in the next week, and ‘first shot’ initial parts will take about 2 weeks.
Jeff spent a lot of time looking for EPP molding companies within the US for our foam parts, but most are focused on the automotive and packaging industries and not set up to do small (both in size and quantity) production runs. They also usually have longer lead times and much higher costs than offshore manufacturers, so we have decided to use an offshore manufacturer at this time (although we hope to eventually move to a US-based molding company). We found an experienced manufacturer in China that has just opened a new factory with adequate floor space and new machines. As far as we can tell, the labor conditions are also good. We hope to kick off foam production soon as well - once we do it will take them about 40 days to make the tooling and “first shot” parts.As mentioned before, Lisa/M PCBs are due to be shipped to us on the 5th. Lia PCB production will begin as soon as we have tested one of the Lisa/Ms from the new batch. A US manufacturer has been chosen to assemble these boards. Typical assembly times are expected to range from 2-3 weeks after PCBs and components have arrived.
Other developmentsIn the spirit of sharing our work here we also decided to submit a paper describing the work we have done in getting the Quadshot design up and running to the 2012 IEEE Aerospace Conference (Mar 3-10, 2012) (http://www.aeroconf.org/). This paper was accepted by the conference and once it has been presented and published, we will make it available to you since we feel that you might enjoy reading about the thought and effort that has gone into this project. As an example of the things we did during the design process, here are some streamline views, generated during the aerodynamic analysis, showing the effect of the winglets on the airframe:
Quadshot without winglets
Quadshot with winglets
Decafs Finally, the Decafs shipped on the 7th of November. If any of you ordered a decaf and have not yet received it, please let us know by messaging us on Kickstarter. Please include your address, qty ordered and size in your message.
That's all for now folks ....
Thanks again for your continued support and patience. We will keep you updated on further progress and delivery schedules as and when we know more. We hope you had a great Thanksgiving weekend!
Do check out the new website and upcoming shop at thequadshot.com and visit our forum for even more regular updates and faqs at http://forum.thequadshot.com/.
Best,
-tQt: Piotr, Chris, Pranay, and Jeff.-
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Garm Beall on December 2
All the tech info is great, thanks for that. For those of us who just wanted to support such a great idea, and get a toy to play with, is there any rough release date yet at all? I think by now you have an idea if it's 3 months, 6 months, or more.
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The Quadshot Team on December 5
As we mentioned, we hope to press go on the mold production this week. First shot plastic parts take about two weeks. For foam it takes about 40 days. This is the information we have from the manufacturers. After we receive sample parts we will check their quality and if we are happy we will start production, then ship the parts to us for assembly. So we sadly don't have firm dates. But we hope it will be rather 3 months than 6 months.
-tQt.
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Post Comment - Removed
pull-ups on the USB GPIO.
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on November 30
The Quadshot Team
commented on a projectHey all, Sorry about the long silence; final touches prior to the production run have been a huge time sink lately :). One of the more exciting things we have been working on is a way to allow the Quadshot to be flat packed, making it much easier to carry around, and hopefully simultaneously make it even more robust to crash damage than it already is. We are going to put out an update with all the development work we have done on the airframe & electronics as well as information on the manufacturing / tooling front in the next couple of days. Please bear with us till then. Thanks for your understanding and continuing support. -tQt.
The Quadshot Team
Santa Cruz, CA
The Quadshot team is Piotr Esden-Tempski, Chris Forrette, Jeff Gibboney, and Pranay Sinha. We all have engineering backgrounds, and we met while working at Joby Energy in Santa Cruz, CA.
Perfectly wonderful!
And thanks for updating the wiki!
Nice work guys!