3DR Solo

» see 3dr.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

3D Robotics announced the Solo on 13 April 2015 as the first drone with a computer in it, which was marketing, but not by much. There was an i.MX6 running Linux in the airframe and a second one in the controller. From a game-style handset you got full control of a GoPro hanging underneath, plus a set of canned camera moves the company called smart shots. It cost a thousand dollars, and Best Buy was the launch retailer, which for an American consumer drone in 2015 was the entire distribution plan.

DJI had announced the Phantom 3 five days earlier, at simultaneous launch events on two continents. The Advanced model was $999 and shot 1080p, the Professional was $1,259 and shot 4K, and both of them worked out of the box.

The Solo shipped that summer without its gimbal, which turned up months later and was the part that made the footage worth the money. The firmware was rough for a while after that. 3DR had built inventory for the 2015 holiday season on the assumption the thing would sell the way a Phantom sold, and it did not, so the warehouses stayed full into 2016 while DJI kept cutting. "It's no fun watching prices fall by 70 percent in 9 months," Chris Anderson said afterward.

Ten years on my own work points at cameras on aircraft, and the part of 3D Robotics that survived is the software. ArduPilot came out of the DIY Drones forum Anderson started in 2007, and the Pixhawk boards 3DR manufactured put that flight controller in front of a generation of people building their own airframes. Both are still under things that fly today.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

Chris Anderson was the editor of Wired and ran a hobby site called DIY Drones on the side. Jordi Muñoz was a teenager in Tijuana who built a working flight controller using, among other parts, the motion sensors out of a Nintendo Wii controller. He posted it to the forum and Anderson sent him a check for five hundred dollars. They founded 3D Robotics together in 2009, and Anderson left Wired in 2012 to run it full time.

By 2015 it was the largest consumer drone maker in the United States, with over 350 employees and more than a hundred million dollars raised against a valuation above three hundred and sixty million. Qualcomm Ventures led a fifty million dollar round in February 2015. Richard Branson was an investor. The offices ran from Berkeley down to a factory in Tijuana.

~ the price war ~

DJI made its own components and sold at volume out of Shenzhen, fast enough that a competitor's product was priced against a different DJI every few months. 3DR moved its own manufacturing to Shenzhen at the end of 2015 to get the unit cost down, and it was already too late. The Solo went out at $299 in the clearance period against a cost near $750 to build and ship.

The layoffs came in waves through 2016. More than 150 people went and the San Diego office closed, leaving headcount below 80. Muñoz left at the end of 2015. In October 2016 Anderson told Forbes that the company was finished with Solos and would not be building another drone.

~ what came after ~

3D Robotics turned into a software company. Site Scan pointed drones at construction sites and turned the imagery into maps engineers could measure against, sold to firms rather than to hobbyists. The 3dr.com domain still answers today and sells flight controllers and GPS units, made in California, to the industry the Solo was never going to reach.

The drone itself had a long afterlife among people who did not much care that the company had left the room. The firmware was open and the airframe came apart with a screwdriver, so third-party parts kept turning up for years. A machine whose maker quits is only as dead as its documentation.

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