Gadgetory

I've done a lot of vivid dreams you know where I'm flying put a lot starfox as a kid I don't know you just get like locked in and like you're inside the drone and then it makes sense it's like at first it makes no sense and then it makes perfect sense and you're just flying hey everybody it's been popper from the verge I'm here at CES 2015 out in the middle of the mountains in Las Vegas Nevada enjoying a beautiful sunset and my first ever drone rodeo so we've been out here doing drone racing is that a thing is that a sport is that what hobbyists do what is drone racing it's definitely in the Hobby world right now and it's starting to become more and more popular and it's it's kind of reminiscent of like hot rodding days you know where there's a lot of tinkering required in the tools typically pretty much all drone racing now is done first-person because it really it's very immersive as you saw but it also forces you to really project yourself into the vehicle if you race off the tablet or another display there's there is a tendency to look up a lot and that really takes you out of the feel of the whole race we do find that spectators who come they want to pay back you know they want to put on a set so they can they can watch the land race and people who have gotten really into it are so good it's it's ridiculous it's really awesome you should try should I give this one a test sure go nuts you're not gonna hurt it so feel free to let loose nice shot you can stomp on it you can roll your car over it when we all started flying a few years ago we would meet together a bunch of artists and robot guys meet on Friday nights and we'd have a Fight Club we'd be smashing our robots together when we started working with drones we immediately started fighting our drones but a couple years ago we were using commercial products and they didn't really hold up very well they would crash and break and that really inspired us to figure out how to make an airframe that could take that abuse ready to fight and they are the basic drone combat game that we play is kind of like sumo wrestling the arena is the ring and if you get knocked onto the ground or if you get caught up in the net that's a point against you so each player starts with three points the first person to reach zero is eliminated so you're doing anything you can flying maneuvering knocking the other guy down to get him to either crash or fall into the net Oh once that happens the player has 90 seconds to get their drone flying again the neck would mean just turning it over and turning it on but it could also mean replacing motors replacing internal components and it's amazing to see some of these pilots who can do these total teardowns and rebuilds in 90 seconds in the design and development process we shot a 12-gauge shotgun and landed it on the water just to see if we could submerge it and fly away we flew it through flamethrowers dropped it from hundreds of feet smashed it thousands of times and the original airframe is actually the airframe that I normally fly in the combat arena today after all that abuse shooting and everything it's still good enough to fly in the arena sad sick dead but not forgotten for more awesome sunset and mountain range videos be sure and subscribe to the YouTube channel