Death of 3D Robotics

It was somewhat of a surprise that 3D Robotics dissolved. Fully expected it to get bought by someone, but they held out for too high of an asking price. They followed the open source philosophy like VA Linux, with the same results. We all lived through the failures after the open source boom of 1999. Now, if you opened up the DJI source code, you would find the 3DR source code. It promotes adoption through charity, but after fueling the kickstarter boom, even millenials have discovered charity doesn't buy as much as making money. Now, like their predicessors, they're hoping for a buyout at a much lower price.

Given enough money, would have gone with 3DR copters because they had replaceable parts & were hackable. All copters have since moved to proprietary all in 1 systems because they're the only way to solve the vibration, balance, & calibration issues. Maybe they're a lot less crashable & the cameras are good enough to not upgrade.

Anyways, consider in 2007 an autonomous quad copter with shaky cam was $18,000 with a lot of fussing. People used to hack them in their spare time. Today, the Mavic Pro is $1000 with a rock solid cam & no fuss. No-one hacks quad copters anymore. You just put them in the air & they're as good as tripods.

It was 1 of those niches which suddenly went from not existing to having unlimited possibilities with only the need for someone to figure out what the right quad copter was. The brushless gimbals have also followed the downward trend towards phone size. It's not long before the original Gopro box with 3 big motors is gone & the complete gimbal + camera fits in a what was once the Gopro box.