rosco11
Well-Known Member
I went to a meet and greet here in Miami Florida held by a local group I will not name. It is not the first i have attended but like the others, it had the same flavor.
A complete disconnect by those who want to promote their hobby and the people they want to encourage to get involved.
We all want the same thing. The more people who take up the hobby, the faster innovation within the sport happens, the better the equipment becomes, the more variety and opportunities we have to choose from within the sport.
What was presented was the cutting edge of racing quadcopters along with a live demonstration and people to eagerly answer questions for those that came to see. So you have a group of people showing off the cutting edge of the sport to people with so little knowledge, they do not even know what to ask. You have presented equipment that was so far beyond their understanding as to make it pointless. Might as well have read them a tech bulletin in Chinese.
To get people started, they presented a micro copter than in order to make it FPV, you needed to buy a separate camera, transmitter, a hot glue gun and brush up on your soldering skills to put it together, then buy some type of display to see it. Why they just didn't have a hubsan x107 to show them eluded me. To easy i guess. How do you show off your mad engineering skills with a RFT out of the box system that costs less than 80 bucks?
These are 16 year old kids looking to get their first car and being taken to a seminar on how to build and race dragsters. The entire showing was completely lost on most of them. If the aim was to promote and sell product, it was the wrong venue. They offered lessons for a fee as well. I doubt they had many takers. No point in learning how to build and race a dragster if you do not even know how to drive and not even sure if you will even like it enough to go that far. Ever.
The same is going on with transmitters and a host of new quads being developed. Gadgets developed by technicians for technicians, not the people with the potential to make the sport grow.
If we want the sport to grow, we need to entice the flyers of tomorrow, not put on self gratifying shows about awesome equipment and mad flying skills most people will never have, nor want to have. That does not mean, however, they they will not want to get involved up to a lessor level and have fun doing it. But that is all I see those with more experience trying to sell. The cutting edge. And to them, dumbing it down enough for that first car person is a lesson on building a micro quad, programming a transmitter and a crash course in Cleanflight.
If we want more interest, we need to give them more user friendly equipment choices. It is like the first version of DOS. Many people did not have a computer because they did not understand them. Better interface, more sales. More complicated choices for an already formidable learning curve, less sales.
From the presentation, to finale product, we need to sell easy with a hint of where it might lead. Not the dragster but you need to start over there.
What they should have done is display a host of RTF products and get them into peoples hands. Maybe set up a small course for mini or mico quads and let people get involved. What manufacturers need to do is create plug and play equipment and user friendly interfaces.
Experienced pilots will mostly not want the change because starting over is not what they want to do. They want everyone to catch up to them. But they are so far down the road, a lot of people are going to take a pass and find something else to do. I saw more people walking away after a shot time than people asking questions and wanting to get involved. Too much, too heavy, too high of a learning curve.
Some manufacturers are trying. the headless tech is a start. I saw another with a self leveling single axis gimbal on a race copter. Not surprisingly, it was shunned by more experienced fliers and the rest of the quad was too advanced for the people who would appreciate it.
Why are there two separate sticks for pitch and yaw? How much programming would it take to combine them into one control? Turning your head in the direction you want to go is intuitive. We do it on almost everything we fly, drive or sail. Spending countless hours learning the rate of turn on a stick, while maintaining throttle for speed and altitude, and focusing on pitch on the other hand is not intuitive. It is a turn off for many new fliers. Only the most determined stick it out past the point of flying around the living room.
Set up a head tracker to control yaw. intuitive. easy. most of you wont like it, but new fliers will love it. Make yaw a function of pitch, just like a car, boat, jet. intuitive. easy. Less complicated for the new driver.
In my opinion that is the direction equipment manufacturers and experienced fliers need to look to increase user participation. Not drag races, crash courses in computer programming and soldering 101. You learned the hard way. That is the very reason there are not more of you and thus, the very reason this sport is still in its infancy in spite of it being here for decades.
We need to move past DOS and get to android touch screens.
A complete disconnect by those who want to promote their hobby and the people they want to encourage to get involved.
We all want the same thing. The more people who take up the hobby, the faster innovation within the sport happens, the better the equipment becomes, the more variety and opportunities we have to choose from within the sport.
What was presented was the cutting edge of racing quadcopters along with a live demonstration and people to eagerly answer questions for those that came to see. So you have a group of people showing off the cutting edge of the sport to people with so little knowledge, they do not even know what to ask. You have presented equipment that was so far beyond their understanding as to make it pointless. Might as well have read them a tech bulletin in Chinese.
To get people started, they presented a micro copter than in order to make it FPV, you needed to buy a separate camera, transmitter, a hot glue gun and brush up on your soldering skills to put it together, then buy some type of display to see it. Why they just didn't have a hubsan x107 to show them eluded me. To easy i guess. How do you show off your mad engineering skills with a RFT out of the box system that costs less than 80 bucks?
These are 16 year old kids looking to get their first car and being taken to a seminar on how to build and race dragsters. The entire showing was completely lost on most of them. If the aim was to promote and sell product, it was the wrong venue. They offered lessons for a fee as well. I doubt they had many takers. No point in learning how to build and race a dragster if you do not even know how to drive and not even sure if you will even like it enough to go that far. Ever.
The same is going on with transmitters and a host of new quads being developed. Gadgets developed by technicians for technicians, not the people with the potential to make the sport grow.
If we want the sport to grow, we need to entice the flyers of tomorrow, not put on self gratifying shows about awesome equipment and mad flying skills most people will never have, nor want to have. That does not mean, however, they they will not want to get involved up to a lessor level and have fun doing it. But that is all I see those with more experience trying to sell. The cutting edge. And to them, dumbing it down enough for that first car person is a lesson on building a micro quad, programming a transmitter and a crash course in Cleanflight.
If we want more interest, we need to give them more user friendly equipment choices. It is like the first version of DOS. Many people did not have a computer because they did not understand them. Better interface, more sales. More complicated choices for an already formidable learning curve, less sales.
From the presentation, to finale product, we need to sell easy with a hint of where it might lead. Not the dragster but you need to start over there.
What they should have done is display a host of RTF products and get them into peoples hands. Maybe set up a small course for mini or mico quads and let people get involved. What manufacturers need to do is create plug and play equipment and user friendly interfaces.
Experienced pilots will mostly not want the change because starting over is not what they want to do. They want everyone to catch up to them. But they are so far down the road, a lot of people are going to take a pass and find something else to do. I saw more people walking away after a shot time than people asking questions and wanting to get involved. Too much, too heavy, too high of a learning curve.
Some manufacturers are trying. the headless tech is a start. I saw another with a self leveling single axis gimbal on a race copter. Not surprisingly, it was shunned by more experienced fliers and the rest of the quad was too advanced for the people who would appreciate it.
Why are there two separate sticks for pitch and yaw? How much programming would it take to combine them into one control? Turning your head in the direction you want to go is intuitive. We do it on almost everything we fly, drive or sail. Spending countless hours learning the rate of turn on a stick, while maintaining throttle for speed and altitude, and focusing on pitch on the other hand is not intuitive. It is a turn off for many new fliers. Only the most determined stick it out past the point of flying around the living room.
Set up a head tracker to control yaw. intuitive. easy. most of you wont like it, but new fliers will love it. Make yaw a function of pitch, just like a car, boat, jet. intuitive. easy. Less complicated for the new driver.
In my opinion that is the direction equipment manufacturers and experienced fliers need to look to increase user participation. Not drag races, crash courses in computer programming and soldering 101. You learned the hard way. That is the very reason there are not more of you and thus, the very reason this sport is still in its infancy in spite of it being here for decades.
We need to move past DOS and get to android touch screens.