anonairwavedev

Thank you —- this makes me feel much better about the time I spent there :)

None of those customers ever got an SDK (because there wasn't one) or any software. They only provided vehicles.

We actually did have something at that point -- it was based on existing hardware and it did work. I seem to recall the original CEO taking I think someone from A16Z (?) out to a parking lot and flying an aircraft around as a demo

It has less to do with the space, and more to do with the odd engineering decisions and multiple pivots.

There wasn't a SDK or platform to build on and we didn't take any actual orders for anything (so we had minimal success stories or $$$). The hardware we showed was built by us, and ran a custom OS (not based on linux) that was nearly impossible to work with. We had a very talented engineer rage-quit after spending a week attempting to figure out how the OS handled the internal message bus system to debug an issue.

The hardware was also crazy expensive. We built literally everything: the vehicles, autopilot, the autopilot OS, the comms board that connected to motors (and enclosures), the sensor boards (GPS, gyro, etc), the radio that talked to the autopilot, the flight planning software, and later an entire enterprise cloud stack written in only the newest of the new JS frameworks and containers. The team often decided to do things such as not use off-the-shelf processors like the Nvidia TK1 or existing embedded software solutions -- nothing was 'good enough' so everything was invented.

Oh, and did I mention we also cycled through recruiters like candy?

Nope, never did. We build 2 OS(s): the first was based on linux with a rtos package (2013-14?). That was scrapped and a new fully custom hardware package was built with a fully custom OS (built by a team that never had done this) and was built for a low power arm processor. We were plagued by huge issues most of the time due to that OS being nearly impossible to debug or work with. Also doing that prevented any third-party from building anything because there wasn't a SDK or even a platform to build on.