Can the US Build a DJI? A Teardown of Two DJI Drones
arenaphysica.comI worked for a company that built quad copters in the US.
Building them here isn't that difficult at all. They're relatively simple, as far as electronic goods go.
Getting insurance is nearly impossible though, as US manufacturers have a significant disadvantage over foreign manufacturers and importers when it comes to liability.
In other countries, if someone does something stupid with your product and hurts themselves or someone else, it's their fault. In the US, if someone does something stupid with your product and hurts themselves or someone else, it's their fault if it was imported, but if the manufacturer has business operations in the US, than it's the manufacturers fault. You might get the importer to stop carrying that exact SKU, but you're not getting any money from them, and they'll just import it under a different SKU.
Doesn't 'do not do' list in form of a 100 page pamphlet avoid this? I knew that US notoriously has warnings on everything simple like 'Hot cup might burn' but I assumed that's always to avoid liability, can't the same be applied here?
Teardowns of dji stuff is important to see how far behind we’ve fell
From an electrical engineering perspective, the one thing that strikes me is just how cheaply some of the engineering that goes into FPV drones actually is.
Like everything is thick wires hand soldered
If you look at DJI and their PCBs they use flexible PCBs for a ton and sensible sane connectors. Getting the board design, the ESD, back EMF right probably took them a ton of time in design and validation but once they did … they stamped it out.
It can be done again and might actually make sense to do as an opensource effort. Even with the fully assembled PCB … it wouldn’t be terrible.
Could totally be done in the US, but I doubt for things other than military applications a US company is going to put the time in to do something like that. In DJIs case, they were at the very least probably state subsidized early on.
We don’t have a similar push specifically in the US other than for defense which tells me our country still isn’t serious about any of this.
I’m sure we could, but Skydio chose to build only for the government as soon as they took the axe to DJI, ensuring that nobody could get a US built drone.
Thanks, Adam Bry.
The East Germans did excellent industrial espionage and they could copy the West.
The hard part is making things at scale. And let's face it nobody wants expensive American drones if they can buy cheap Chinese ones.
The US can't build anything anymore.