David 'Yukon'
@YukonK9
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Following
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Founder of @K9DefenseTech Defense drone dev, dog lover, (🇺🇸/acc) 1 Peter 3:14~15 I'm 🇰🇷🇺🇲 Freedom Isn't Free 🇺🇲🐺 drones, drones, drones.
Atlanta, Georgia
Joined January 2023
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Politics is downstream from culture, culture is downstream from institutions, institutions are downstream from technology, technology is downstream from economics, and economics is downstream from principled philosophy. If you want to make a difference, invest upstream from tech.
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Oh cool, your drone is NDAA compliant. But does it have the Preamble of the United States Constitution baked into the drone???? Ours will 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
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Remix dev prototype I'm working on for the PVS-69 project. Optics has significantly improved over the months, and now lots of work among devs on integrating thermal. Kudos to Vonscherf Arms for making affordable FOSS 3D printable digital NVGs a reality. Digital is the future!
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Literally using hobby RC jet turbines! I think Western weapons procurement has to be more accepting of COTS-based end products RAPIDLY. That'll yield superior ROI per dollar spent. The terrorists just shot down a multi-million dollar drone for probably like $30k...
The parchamdar documentary showed never before seen footage of a 358 loitering SAM downing an American MQ-1 UAV (likely in Yemen), including high resolution seeker footage
Confirmation 358 is indeed the official designation. It's been supplied to Ansarallah, Hezbollah & the PMF
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Swashplateless blade pitch control by
@vertiq_
, absolutely mind blowing! Flapping or Tettering hinge plus precise motor speed changes mid revolution.
Was cool talking about one of their founder collaborating with
@TomStantonYT
(how I already knew of them!)
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They know.
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How many airborne thermal imaging optic payloads are just listed on Ebay is kinda insane LOL.
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Hardware dev litmus test question: How many generic cheapo chineseium flush cutters do you ruin a month?
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I used to think printing dummy parts was a waste of time and material, but now I'm a huge fan. It saves so much time in development having just copies of your parts around for getting a feel for and doing integration tests.
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IT'S ALIVE!! I've been freaking waiting/working up for an entire year for this moment! I can't wait to get this up in the air! The ghostly rotor sound is unlike any other drone of this class.
It's alive! The first static test of the Valor sUAS flight test airframe with all four of its stealth props! More ground testing and tuning will be done in preparation for flight testing.
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Drone Bros: Build cool hacker drone, so cool.
Boomers: OMG THEY'RE BUILDING SKYNET!
Drone Bros: Let's make the light turn red when it starts hacking lol.
Thanks
@uavbro
for the silly suggestion, I laughed multiple times soldering in that red light lol!
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-We don't have child labor/cheap labor
- We don't do massive IP theft
- We don't have domestic chip production at scale
- We don't have lax environmental laws for rare earth refinement
- We're no longer a manufacturing economy...
Why are there no American-made consumer drones under $500?
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If anyone wants to make a poor man's Menace-X, let me know. It won't have Lattice though, just chat GPT and ATAK because we're on a budget lol.
Trying to buy one of the
@anduriltech
Menace-X vehicles so me and the boys can go off roading
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What a freaking world class event! Congratulations to the top three teams! I was awestruck by the shear volume of talent and innovation in this single space!
Special thanks to
@0xPHBD
@anishgoel_
@the_simonpastor
@rasmusdeymeyer
@apollo_defense
@ADoricko
@join_ef
@8vc
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I don't think it was meant to be an easter egg, but one of the panels on the B-21 makes a mini B-21!
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Special thanks to:
@MichaelJGTZ
@the_simonpastor
@0xPHBD
@anishgoel_
@HoffmanTactical
@uavbro
@cemaxecuter
@ArkElectron
@0xBA60FF1EA5
@Wild_Arms_RandD
@Chemist_John_
(& others not on X)
You've all made a significant positive impact through my 2023 journey!
It's been one heck of a year of building, accelerating, and iterating. Things are about to get insane in 2024, the year we plan to make our major moves in democratizing American tactical sUAS technology. LET'S GO!!
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I wanted
@K9DefenseTech
to have the most futuristic business card ever. If you were at the Gundo Defense Tech Hackathon, you probably picked one up!
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If you were wondering, this is what all those zipties were for lol. Companies quoted me upwards of $3k for a drone test cage this size, so I bought some nylon netting and a pack of zipties and made one with a budget of $60.
Latest addition to the drone lab, a drop down indoor test flight cage. Drones can now be built and safley test flown in the same space!
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Hot take but drones will render the rifleman relatively obsolete, non visual line of sight surgical engagements is a reality no one is prepared for.
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How many guys about to transform the U.S. drone industry can you have on one table? What an EPIC night with
@uavbro
@OHichwa
@ArkElectron
@IkeLAtkinson
and Josh Henderson! Special thanks to
@ArkElectron
for hosting!
Neros, ARK, Momentum, K9, Ardupilot 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
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It's not that complicated!!!
god why are men so hard to get gifts for
wtf do u people want
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Thanks to
@chianlihang
for visiting
@K9DefenseTech
yesterday! Underground drone dev from
@pipedream_labs
meets flying drone dev, how cool is that! Also did a SUPER sketchy manual hop of Valor inside the flight test cage lol (Valor has only flown outside due to its sheer size).
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My feed is flooded with Apple Vision Pro posts, but my mind is on how such mass consumer electronics tech can be pooled into the even more exciting defense uses for AR spatial computing!
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Today there were two Paul Allen's on the show floor
@XPONENTIALshow
:
@K9DefenseTech
and
@Momentum_Drones
;)
We both may be startups now, but we're going to go big or go home, starting from our business cards!
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Remember when Huawei was putting cell towers near our nuclear missile silos?
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Heck yeah! Hardware from
@K9DefenseTech
and
@Momentum_Drones
making it into the recap video. Let's go!
The City of El Segundo put together a recap of the defense tech hackathon
TLDR is dudes rock, the Gundo rocks
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For 2kg+ folding drone platforms, the market only offers complex and bulky locking arm mechs (pictured below). We used commercially available cam levers to make a dead simple and super compact arm lock that just works, no need for very complex and expensive custom solutions!
New ultra fast toolless arm locks for Valor sUAS. Tactical drones need to be able to deploy FAST. It was challenging to develop a low profile and low mass lock mech strong enough for Valor. Previous iterations required a field tool and took up to 30 seconds per arm.
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5 a.m. vibes building out parts organization for drone production and R&D. We're going to pump out so many airframes!
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I forgot about this project! I found these pictures while moving project logs! A few years ago I took apart a pan and tilt security camera to make a desktop
@anduriltech
sentry tower:
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$1,000,000 Wecam MX-15 Optics package on a $100,000 Cesna:
Neat look at CAP's "Green Flag" capabilities - acting as a lower cost, surrogate Reaper drone during military exercises -
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Yes it's RGB. That is a mandatory feature!
Feels so cyber, I freaking love it.
Introducing the latest extension to the dev lab, the new manufacturing shop! Ready to support small-scale production and R&D efforts entering into 2024.
WE ARE SO BACK.
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Wait till you see PAV-1, 10X cooler and performance boost, and a crazy optics package.
Any Aviation geeks out there who know the reference? Hint: PAV-1 is black, PAV-2 is grey!
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Got a tour of Rangeview and Neros yesterday. MY MIND WAS BLOWN. Both operations are so freaking dialed in, it's a total balance of art and engineering. I unfortunately had to leave early :(
It was a honor to finally meet
@cameron62s
@OHichwa
and
@soren_ma
!
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What an amazing event today! Didn't expect to be on stage demoing what I've been building
@K9DefenseTech
, but it was exciting!!
Thanks to everyone who chatted with me! Special thanks to
@teddyfeld
@the_simonpastor
@TechSqATL
Joe Ros and all the guys
@startupxchange
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It's funny
@uavbro
's
@redbull
drone is more red bull than red bull's own drone lol
Can't wait to see these cans fly!
@ti_morse
fueled this innovation. Thanks
@YukonK9
for the collaboration on the motor mounts. This is just a mock-up. The final version will likely have an additional Red Bull on each arm. Thanks to
@ARK_Electr0nics
for the excellent electronics that will go in it!
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Late night crack ideas coming to fruition, but you can use a 5w UV laser to burn off the silkscreen and solder mask of PCBs to expose the raw FR4 and copper. Heat warping is an issue, I will experiment further. Could be a useful technique for reverse engineering, evaluation, etc.
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I thought this was fake for a second lol, no way...
I can't believe Anduril went from the
"Tech’s Most Controversial Startup" to making it onto a Mark Rober video.
Defense Tech is winning the narrative, let's freaking go! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
“Thank goodness we got Anvil"
We recently hosted YouTuber
@MarkRober
at Anduril HQ to talk about the challenges of countering drones and why smashing them out of the sky with Anvil is the best approach.
Check it out:
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So many of you have been asking for the diy drone 101 crash course, I've been very busy working on it on whatever free time I have!
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Poast home defense
(I spot you half a kilometer away before you even get near my house, checkmate)
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Hardware iteration is this incubating days on end, and every move you make dollars are literally flying away. There's no guarantee it'll even work and you may need to start all over and take a huge loss. When it's time to deliver you need to solve manufacturing, supply chain.....
Hardware people think software is easy; software people think hardware is easy.
Why?
Hardware people know how hard hardware is; software people know how hard software is.
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PAV-2 was dev gen 4. Just pulled the 2nd all nighter in a row today to complete the entire base system architecture for dev gen 5, the production variant. Same form factor, completely new airframe allowing for some insane variants of Valor, stay tuned!
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I did a presentation on 3D printing, & 3D printed guns in middle school. Most of the articles I found referenced the single explosion of the Liberator in the ATF Lab as an analog for all 3D printed guns. That's where the false notion about it blowing up in your hand comes from.
Not only ILLEGAL, BUT extremely unsafe. I small mistake in temperature, thickness, length or width will create a BOMB in your hand. I will not FIRE much less OWN a 3d printed weapon.
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Got my company issued Graphene phone from
@DigitlAnalogLLC
about a week ago, really loving Graphene OS! Robert made sure to send the
@DoomerTapes
special too, pretty sweet.
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Something so sci-fi about a rusty sea hardened drone boat, a worn down giant rocket grappling robot, and a charred space hardened rocket booster.
RIP B1058
Falcon 9 B1058 🫡🇺🇸🚀🪱
A portion of the record-setting Falcon 9 booster remains on board the Just Read the Instructions droneship. After its 19th launch and landing, the vehicle tipped over in rough seas during the transit back to Port Canaveral, and its top portion broke off.
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Cool experiment. With 0.25 3d printing nozzles, you can cheaply print most solder stencils for SMD projects!
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CNC machining drone rotor hubs coincidentally yields waste pieces that are the perfect carbon fiber ninja stars lol.
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Whoever is responsible for this many standards for a single connector type should be in jail. USB C integrators like me are agonizing daily.
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On the 3 day drive back to Atlanta from El Segundo, I got to experience Texas for the first time. I am literally falling in love with this state, Texas is amazing 🇨🇱!
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Painted the new
@K9DefenseTech
shop. Grey floors and white walls, very aerospace, just how I like it!
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I think this is the ultimate giga chad revenge you could pull of as an EE to your entire OCD occupied department LOL!
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@Hoplite_Ind
Your supplier was Chinese right? Thing to note about wholesale suppliers off of Alibaba, they're usually the ones who also run the stores on Aliexpress, so trying to wholesale order and then re-sell goods on your site from Chinese suppliers means they'll always dupe you.
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Found the best combination for the 3D printable solder stencil:
0.05 layer height, 3 perimeter layers, PLA+
Flexible and durable! Going to pit a write up on the
@K9DefenseTech
dev wiki.
Cool experiment. With 0.25 3d printing nozzles, you can cheaply print most solder stencils for SMD projects!
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Designed a new CNC shroud with lights, coolant pump, new motor air cooling vents, and camera! The camera is perfectly focused at the end mill, so no need to pause an operation to check on the condition of the tool head.
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I didn't know it's now 5 a.m., I also didn't know building drone tech at scale would require scraping concrete this late into the night lol.
Day 2 of construction, new small scale manufacturing floor for drones in the works for
@K9DefenseTech
!
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YES.
When you can't find the existing CAD online... Just roll your sleeves up and get to work!
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Never thought about this, but locomotion through grain is an interesting niche engineering challenge that's unlike any other medium that's well understood i.e. sand, dirt, rocks, gravel, etc.
The
@Grain_Weevil
is a remote-controlled robot that uses augers and gravity to level grain, break crusts, conduct inspections, and feed grain into extraction augers. It is portable and, if accidentally buried, can dig itself out of up to 5 feet of grain.
Credits:
@Grain_Weevil
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To everyone who keeps saying the flag is backwards, the component mounts to the belly of the drone, aligned upright to a serial number label (not in render).
At this point any orientation would've bothered someone. Should've just done the F-117 design lol.
Oh cool, your drone is NDAA compliant. But does it have the Preamble of the United States Constitution baked into the drone???? Ours will 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
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So they emphasize on mass reduction, but the real secret here is manufacturability at scale!
Every element of our P2 Zip is intentionally designed to increase its efficiency and travel distance. Heavy, tangled cables weren't going to work. Want to know what we did instead? Watch this video.
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All the major internal components on our drone (many of which will never see the light of day) have fun easter eggs. This one is my favorite. IYKYK.
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@thenewarea51
@HamWa07
Holy crap, as unfortunate the accident is, if the nose of the plane hit the driver's door that could've been really bad, it thankfully hit the the front of the car. Imagine telling your friends and family, "my car was hit by a plane" lol
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@IranDefense
Coyote Block 2 is still too expensive imo, they're like $15,000 an interceptor. MALE drone interception can be done for roughly $8,000 with still 30% profit margins with COTS parts domestically available in the U.S.
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Nowhere near as cool as the Gundo Boys, but
@K9DefenseTech
is
#1
for the Atlanta boys for now on lol.
Well I guess technically
@pipedream_labs
has a presence here so
@chianlihang
takes the W!
@rmcentush
@pronounced_kyle
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I just realized today that drones are embodying the phone camera cluster meme pretty fast lol.
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With something we're working on, I asked
@Yeldeezy
what we should use as cheap cUAS targets. He suggested balloons. I didn't know the Army is literally doing the same thing lol!
Interesting video, courtesy the Wall Street Journal, showing the new drone warfare training academy out of Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
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Government talking about banning Dji.
American drone companies:
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I know who's bed this is, and he is one of the most cracked and talented electrical engineer I've ever met!
stopped by el segundo to see some defense tech startups. saw this…
bed in the conference room.
they are moving offices to add more conference rooms (and beds).
future of America is bright and strong.
asked to invest.
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Why didn't I try hot plate SMD soldering sooner? This is probably the most satisfying thing I've seen this year:
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Over engineering is bad, but it's fun. I try to strictly avoid over engineering drones, but embrace it for custom internal tooling/test equipment for the fun of it!
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Using 40152S cells is so based, it's the natural inclination to go the easy route with Li-ion for such high current applications. Early adopting LiFePO4 for a staticly installed power pack/buffer is so awesome to see!
Can you design the world's most powerful stove and secretly add 1.4 terawatt hours of battery power to the grid?
Founder
@sdamico
thinks so.
Episode 27 of S³ featuring
@ImpulseLabs_
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Need defensive naval autonomy on a carrier? We can take care of the drones
@K9DefenseTech
,
@uavbro
,
@ArkElectron
@cemaxecuter
can take care of EW
@MnMFehler
@legitflyer
can take care of the maritime drone station, just saying ;)
@elonmusk
@all_in_tok
@DavidSacks
Open invitation to the best damn ship in the Navy to talk automation!
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Cool fact without doxing myself, my day job is like a few minutes from where Hermeus does their testing. I believe I've heard some of their static tests before too which is really cool.
Ground testing of our first fully-integrated vehicle, Quarterhorse Mk 0, is complete.
The vehicle was designed and built within six months, and all test objectives were completed in just 37 days of deployed testing.
Next up, flight testing of Quarterhorse Mk 1.
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Look at that beautiful red coated saphire glass on the EOTS, I'm obsessed with military electro optics!
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To any RF source, and especially
@DJIGlobal
drones, DragonDrone is like:
DragonDrone hardware integration in the works. Building the ultimate SIGINT/EW hacker drone with
@cemaxecuter
!
Powered by
@ARK_Electr0nics
& DragonOS.
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Institutional learning never worked for me. Much of what I apply today was self taught, but there's limits. As I scale a product today, I'm learning things like DFM, manufacturing first principles, etc. the hard way.
Wish I had
@TryOpenX
back in middle school!
As of June 2024, I have called for
@TryOpenX
to cease all active efforts with Universities
Despite our best efforts we’re unable to convince academics to charge less, focus on careers or do anything beside PHD paths
Our only option - We will build our own Industry School
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Best U.S. drone electronics on the market
@ARK_Electr0nics
🤝 toughest drone frame on the market
@Momentum_Drones
!
Jumping on the bandwagon showing indoor position hold on the
@DroneBlocks
DEXI 5 with the
@ARK_Electr0nics
Pi6X Flow autopilot running
@PX4Autopilot
.
The DEXI is available now for pre-order now!
#drones
#drone
#uav
#uas
#px4
#gpsdenied
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Close to 1,000 days of total print time on my i3 MK3. I bought it a while ago after saving up by mowing lawns. It's my absolute favorite tool and the best investment I've ever made!
Hey
@josefprusa
@Prusa3D
ever looking to sponsor someone? I bet I could put the mk4 to good use!
Over six years ago, we launched the Original Prusa i3 MK3, a product that changed the 3D printing world and allowed our company to grow, bringing you many cool things like PrusaSlicer, Prusament, the Original Prusa MINI, XL, , and the MK3's successor, the
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Seriously, if you plan on working on hardware, choosing a location to work out of near a McMaster Carr warehouse can make a huge difference. I don't have a dedicated McMaster car, but the Atlanta warehouse means one day delivery. Such a lifesaver!
The Porsche is our dedicated McMaster car
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New record achieved. In 48 hours:
- 10 new major electrical subsystem designed
- new in house payload interface protocol finalized
- 3 new open architecture protocols integrated
- all electrical subsystens modified to maximized compatibility with automated assembly
Major developments in open architecture drone flight electronics; optimizing to adapt to shifting supply chains, remaining future proof via modularity, and maintaining ease for end users. The future lies in drone electronic subsystems that snap into each other.
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Fundamentally, America is not behind on drone technology, technical talent, nor R&D, America is behind on a manufacturing base that can cheaply outproduce its adversaries.
Imagine if instead of spending $1.7T on the F-35 program
America spent $1.7T reshoring manufacturing centered around cheap drone production
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@AirPowerNEW1
I called it!
I don't think it was meant to be an easter egg, but one of the panels on the B-21 makes a mini B-21!
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F-117 still looks so alien to this day. Imagine the 21st century version of this moment with NGAD and other drones in the works, our brains will probably explode lol.
This photo is iconic. On this day, 35 years ago, Assistant Secretary of Defense J. Daniel Howard displayed a grainy photograph at a Pentagon press conference, unveiling for the first time the shape of the F-117A, the stealth jet that had been secretly flying for 7 years already.
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It's like the hardware dev version of having your own candy shop 👌.
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Day 2 of construction, new small scale manufacturing floor for drones in the works for
@K9DefenseTech
!
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