#105 – An Interview with Chris Anderson – Deambulatory Daedal Drones

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Welcome, Chris Anderson (@chr1sa)!

Chris is the editor of Wired and has been for 11 years. He is also a co-Founder of DIY drones, a 20,000+ strong community of UAV enthusiasts and also runs the commercial arm, 3D robotics!  He has also written books about the growth of the internet including The Long Tail and Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Later this year he will be releasing a book about the Maker Movement called, “Makers: The New Industrial Revolution“.

• Chris also started the Geek Dad Blog, now run as an official Wired Blog.
• With his own children, 3D printing doll house furniture is a regularly enjoyed activity.
• Chris has had many of the early 3D printers and currently has a MakerBot Thingomatic.
• Dave recently got a Replicator (and promptly broke it)
  [tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTuL_nKSKFg&feature=plcp[/tube]
• The next round of 3D printers might move towards SLA-like lasered resins, similar to this recent kickstarter project.
• Chris believes there are more than one “Pit of Despair” as stated by Nathan Seidle of SparkFun
  • As stated last week, there was also a followup piece called “The Pit of Opportunity” (not mentioned on today’s show)
• The DIY Drones community had help from Andrew Tridgell of the Samba project and Jono Bacon of the Ubuntu project (and author of “The Art of Community”)
• Tim O’Reilly calls this the Architecture of Participation
• DIY Drones is seeing more cloners, some in China (though there are great contributors from China as well)
• Manufacturing for 3D Robotics is done in San Diego, CA and Tijuana, Mexico.
• Co-Founder Jordi Muñoz now runs the day to day operations of the commercial arm.
• There is a mysterious release planned for later this week, but we didn’t want to invoke the Osborne Effect.
• 3D robotics has its own brand of rf mesh (as opposed to the Xbee) called the 3DR radio based on the Hope RF HM-TRP module.
• Chris does not think they would have used Kickstarter when beginning 3D robotics.
• Arduino is moving to an ARM for their next revision in the Arduino Due.
• The ArduCopter platform actually still has processing power to spare because of the offloading and multiple chips on board.
• The Invensense MPU6000 does a lot of processing which helps offload the main processor.
• The next round of innovation will be machine learning so that drones are more aware of their surroundings and PID loop tweaking won’t be as difficult.
• Chris has a new book coming out in October called, “Makers: The New Industrial Revolution“.
  • Makers allow for The Long Tail of manufacturing things. Whereas a large company might not see a reason to make something, now people are empowered to make it in small quantities and distribute it via the internet.
• To find out more about Chris, check out his wiki page (or edit it) or just Google him.

Many thanks again to Chris for stopping by The Amp Hour. Please leave comments here or on the Discuss Forum and let us know what you thought! Also consider signing up for the DIY Drones community or subscribing to their feed to get the latest news in this exciting field.

Thanks to Joi Ito for the image