The design challenge: A bright drone light that has minimal impact on flight time, and that can be seen from more than 3 miles away in daytime conditions.
Reason: FAA visual flight rules, at the time, allowed pilots to fly drones "unrestricted" as long as they could tell where the drone was, and in which direction it was pointing, with the naked eye.
Our solution to this problem: We designed a self-leveling (simplified 3-axis gimbal), rotating, flashing, "lighthouse" device.
Through an iterative design process with lots of
consideration taken to client ideas and opinions, flight tests, and many, many prints, we came up with a very light weight and balanced design. Fast and easy assembly was achieved with a minimized number of parts, and all of them self aligning and snapping together where needed. Flying prototypes were produced by 3D printing all custom parts from the CAD models, in light, exotic materials. Flight tests with our pre-production prototypes were very successful.
Due to FAA changes to the visual flight rules, any further production plans are mothballed.