First Flight
Team Conreality just wrapped up a fruitful visit to Kyiv, testing and bringing home our new XXL-sized paintball drone built in collaboration with our friends at Drone.UA:
Needless to say, we attracted quite a crowd of spectators while field testing the drone outside the Drone.UA offices. Not only did neighbors leave their offices to come say hello, but even people driving by stopped and parked to come meet us.
The drone is based on the DJI Matrice 600 heavy-lift hexacopter platform supplemented with a DJI Ronin-MX gimbal. The payload of a paintball marker with its compressed air supply is our own design (and still a work in progress). Powered by six large batteries, we can remain airborne for about 20 minutes. There are separate pilot and trigger controls.
We want to thank Drone.UA owners Valerii and Fevzi, and all the staff who helped us–in particular engineer Vladislav! And not only was this an outstanding engineering collaboration, but we are also proud to have introduced Drone.UA to the use of bitcoin when settling all expenses related to the project.
We still have some more work to do on more precisely balancing the payload in the gimbal, but we expect to start fielding the drone in paintball games come spring 2020. In the meantime, our efforts are focused on the software for making this bird semi-autonomous and fun to play against—from a safe distance!
The full photo album from our first flight is available on our Facebook page, and the video is on our YouTube channel. More to follow as we put our new drone through its paces!
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