Intro To My Drones

Most of you visiting probably already know I do a lot of work with drones, but I haven’t really blogged about it much, especially since DroneHaus closed. Here’s a quick recap of the last 6 years with drones.

A friend of mine, at the time, found the YouTube video we’ve probably all seen by now

And he ordered a ZMR250 on eBay (poor BlackOut frame 🙁 ). Before I knew it, I had my own ZMR250. And flying was… Hard.

Little did I know that the loose flight controller running on weird firmware wasn’t exactly helpful.

But when my buddy and I went to the First ever Drone Nationals (#FanBoying), I met Mr. CleanFlight and he helped me flash my CC3D board. That was so cool.

After this I built and soon crashed my first 4s rig. That was a big loss, but I wasn’t quite deterred yet. And eventually I would go on to build a couple of popular frames, including the second gen Zuul that I used in the San Mateo Maker Faire Race! I placed 16th that day.

Around this time I had made quick friends with an entrepreneur, and we ended up starting a business together. Eventually we even got our own office:

We would spend some time here, eventually move next door, and design some seriously underrated frames. I was really proud of some of the design work we did here. As soon as I figured out how Alien implemented the Pythagorean theorem into their motor layout, it was game on and I reworked that theory into a Stretched-X design (which I only seem to have a bad picture of. Have to find and update later):

But life would soon have it’s way, and I needed to find a way to pay bills. I made mistakes with credit cards… and I fixed them and then made those mistakes again, and the business was barely breaking even.

Once I started my job at Keiser, I had a hard time holding DroneHaus up. Especially since my business partner had taken on his own dream of living by the beach, and we couldn’t exactly afford to take on an employee. We made a good run, but it was time to call it quits and move on.

I learned a lot though! And I had time to really perfect my building process. I absolutely love getting one of these finished, almost as much as I love flying them. When they’re working right.

Ever since I have spent some time using my newer rigs to chase drift cars, more posts on that later, but here is some fun content!

More on future events in my next post! Checkout @SlideChaser for more short videos 😀