Spiri, Kickstarter quadcopter hits stormy waters.
Mike Rizkalla of Raised Performance who trade as Brave New World, have filed in Canada against Pleiades the company behind the 2013 Kickstarter Spiri quadcopter. Remember, 2013 when everything drone was new and exciting.
Spiri raised $146,623 from 382 backers. Of course, the crowd-funded drone missed its delivery target. That is traditional.
Dartmouth litigator Derek Brett is claiming $197,000 for work undertaken by Raised Performance since 2013 in the Nova Scotia High Court.
The specifications of the Spiri are quite high and it would have made for quite a machine three years ago. It was $600 during the crowdfunding and an eye-watering $2400 now.
Time is not kind to drones that wait, the DJI Spark outperforms Spiri in every department, including price.
The Spiri Beta has the graphical and computational power to be an ideal, fully programmable flying robot. It contains the Tegra X1 SOM on a miniature carrier board with the Pixhawk flight controller and a forward-facing stereo camera system. The Spiri Beta weighs just 1.25kg, and offers over 20 minutes of flight on a full charge, and 1080p stereo video at 30fps with enough power for real-time SLAM and deep learning.
The beta comes with ROS Indigo installed on top of Ubuntu 14.04, along with optimized NVIDIA OpenCV libraries for Tegra.
The beta is equipped with an excellent sensor suite including a 9-axis IMU, GPS and compass, pressure gauge, ultrasonic and optical flow sensors. It is compatible with 2.4GHz hand held remote control devices, and also communicates via dual-band Wi-Fi (using two 3dbi, 2 Watt antennas) to mobile devices, home computers, laptops, and other Spiris. Additional sensors can be connected via USB or I2C. Ground station software such as APM and QGroundControl work with Spiri, as does direct interface via a Spiri webpage or a secure Linux shell.
Production has been delayed while we address a faulty component. Estimated shipping is now July 2017.
