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.

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.

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!

Batteries

We’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 Piotr

Hello all,

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.

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