Drones: We’ve only seen the beginning.

You’d have to be blind not to notice sudden arrival, a few years ago, of seemingly a new class of machine. With their dangerous sounding buzzing, and seemingly alien way of moving, sometimes graceful like birds, sometimes rapid and precise like dragonflies, these flying things have taken the world by storm.

I first saw a quadcopter at the Chaos Computer Club back when the annual conference was still in Berlin. There, surrounded by regulation black hoody wearing hackers, was a hand made, 4 rotor, LED festooned dream.

“Are you gonna fly it!” was the constant question, and eventually lipos were charged and dozens of us hackers filed out into the freezing December air to watch this thing come alive and hover 20 or so feet above us. It was loud, and wobbled a lot, looked dangerous and tipped over, breaking upon landing, but i knew i’d seen something amazing.

I kept coming back to quads, watching them develop into polished camera platforms like the ubiquitous Phantom, toys for rich kids like the Dragan Flyer, or early attempts at consumer christmas gifts like the Parrot Drone.

It was late 2013 or early 2014, YouTubing on the couch after a days snowboarding, that i first saw something that would become, for a time, an all consuming obsession: The Mini Drone.

In the years since i’d first seen that early drone at CCC, the state of the art had advanced. The earliest drones had used Arduinos, wired up to the accelerometers from Nintendo Wii’s, but now people had started building custom flight computers. These new flight computers had faster processors, and had accelerometers taken from high end mobile phones.

The faster CPUs and quicker updates from the gyros meant that smaller, and hence more nimble machines could be built.

Lying there on the couch, watching video after video of pioneers of the minidrone scene like Blackout, and Umagwad (“oh my god”) i realised that i had to do this.

I ordered a frame that night, and then spent weeks researching what other parts i needed.

Delivery of all the bits took weeks, maybe even a month or so, but sometime in February, i laid out all the parts on my kitchen table. In the days and weeks before i’d watched dozens of hours of youtube, pored over hand drawn circuit diagrams, researched how speed controllers worked and voltages and amperages and many other things i’d forgotten since uni.

I built that drone in my head many times, mentally tracing the flow of voltage from the lithium polymer battery, through the power distribution board and into the speed controllers. Other paths for the life giving electrons would run through voltage regulators, through the flight controller, and some would be diverted to pass through filters and voltage regulators to provide power to the camera and video transmitter.

Actually building my blackout mini-h took two full days, but before i was finished came a moment that i’ll never forget.

You see, a mini drone uses a kind of electric motor called a “brushless motor”. Two sets of coils interleave through the motor taking turns in pushing and pulling. Emerging from this motor is 3 wires, all black, all alike. These connect to 3 pads on the speed controller.

“Clearly” ,i thought, “there must be a right way” and a “wrong way” to connect the 3 wires.

Much googling all turned up the same baffling advice. “It doesn’t matter wires connect to what pads, but if the motors go in the wrong direction, swap any two wires.”

This seemed strangely ambiguous after the dire warnings about getting the “polarity” wrong for any other part of the drone.

This also meant i needed to test spinning the motors, before i’d fully finished the quad. The quad would be half built, like a car with no wheels, no doors no roof, and they wanted me to start the engine?

I connected the flight computer to my laptop and opened the software. It connected and showed me the flight computer was alive. Bumping the frame made the displays on my laptop jump around, showing me that it was already aware of its surroundings. At this time the flight computer was being powered from my laptop’s usb power, and it’s motors, and receiver were unpowered.

I sheepishly connected the 12 v battery. An arcing popping sound came from the connector as power flowed through the quad for the first time.

Dee-Dee-Dee-Daaaaaa! 4 beeps of ascending tone, the sound emerging, not from a speaker, but from the motors themselves. Urged to vibrate, by the speed controllers at the exact frequency to produce sounds.

In the software, i disabled the failsafe after confirming there were no propellers attached, and proceeded to drag the slider for one of the motors up.

The bottom right motor sprang into life, moving instantly from idle to faster-than-the-eye-can-see. The motor was so smooth, its rotation so rapid as to appear to be just a blur and all this on the lowest power setting.

I was hooked. I’d built something real, something that could achieve one of mans greatest dreams, Flight, but that hadn’t been much more complicated than building a home pc.

A few weeks later i emailed the London Hackspace mailing list asking if anyone else wanted to meetup and talk about quadcopters. 4 or 5 of us met one Thursday evening and London Aerospace was born. Tom Greer and Tom Sands and i decided to make a regular thing of it.

Rapidly we grew to 50 or 60 people, our meetups grew almost too large to fit in the hackspace’s class room. Our facebook group grew to hundreds of people. We would meet random people in parks; Victoria park, Hackney Marsh and others and tell them about the Hackspace, and about London Aerospace and it was good.

Media requests started coming in as well. We spoke to the BBC, had articles published in the FT, and in tech press websites. We did a taster pilot for the BBC in the tobacco docks, and later a full TV pilot with proper celebrities called Airheads.

Tom Greer, started organising races under the name FPVLeague, and i was able to compete in the British FPV Racing Associations first ever national race, coming second in my 2 heats, ultimately being knocked out by the best pilot in the world, a then 15 year old Luke Bannister.

Fads like drones often seem to follow a kind of curve with two or more progressively larger peaks. First there’s the experimenters, the true pioneers, that with no prior art go and turn imagination into technology. Following them, come the early adopters, the Peter Pan like boys-with-toys who can afford the time and money, and are willing to pay extra for that novel experience. Some things make the jump to mass consumer awareness. They go mainstream.

Qualcomm, a major chip manufacturer, rented Wembley stadium and put on an exhibition race with the best pilots in the world. I did the commentary, and the winner was a Dutch pilot named Metal Danny, one of the original inspirations for me to buy my first drone.

The people buying racing drones now, aren’t hackers, electronics hobbyists, or wanna-be Tony Starks like me. They’re people who watch Formula 1, ride motor bikes, and play Call of Duty on XBox.

And that’s fine. Drone racing is awesome fun. It’s Wipeout with perfect physics and a steep death penalty. Knowing your £500 pound drone could be destroyed if you miss a turn, or clip a tree does amazing things for your adrenal system.

For me though, i’ll never forget the reason why i was first drawn to multi rotors. I truly believe that technology is the gradual reintroduction of magic to the world, this time for real.

I learned to code because i was drawn to the idea of secret words, spells, codexs, codes, that could give me special powers. A youth of reading books about wizards.

One idea i always liked was the “wizards eye”. The ability to create a floating eye, an orb that could move around granting the wizard the ability to see from a different perspective. Another similar idea “worging” has become popularised by Game of Thrones.

This is what i was thinking as i first put on those goggles for the first time, and made my first hesitant flights around the park. I’ll never forget the first time, in Victoria park one evening when i finally got the courage to fly higher than the trees. The view over to London and Canary wharf, and then seeing myself, hunched over a controller staring straight down. The awareness that that was me, but not where my mind was.

Quads, Multi-rotors, Drones what ever you want to call them are an unfinished technology. They’ll get smaller, cheaper and faster. The video resolution will get higher and flying them will become even more of an immersive experience. 3D using 2 cameras is an amazing experience as well, and gives one the confidence to explore confined spaces, tree branches, abandoned buildings and more.

There’ll be more ways to control them, using virtual reality controllers, direct muscle interfaces, or even direct brain interfaces. Wheelchair bound people will experience freedom on the same terms as able bodied people. Emboldened by the success of flying drones, people will build tracked and submersible vehicles to explore other environments. Imaging running your own “mars mission” type tracked robot from the comfort of your home exploring parks by night.

TV shows will spring up, challenging participants to build drones for specific purposes. Racing is fun, but other challenges, like heavy lifting, search and rescue, long distance trips and more haven’t been explored fully yet.

Soon, drones won’t be that new thing, that novel experience, anymore, they’ll be as much part of our world as bicycles and airplanes, and the ever curious minds will be off searching for the next horizon, then next dream to make real.