Eedu is an easy-to-use drone kit. Designed with simplicity in mind, it’s a hardware and software platform that enables inventors who want to create new drone applications. We call these innovators Dronesmiths.
Drones can be more than just flying cameras. Give it a nose for sniffing out hazardous material, temperature sensors for feeling heat, or any other sensor to make exciting applications. Eedu puts you in the designer’s seat.
Students are our inspiration. From our experience with STEAM outreach, we find that students are excited about emerging drone technology and become highly engaged when they can do hands-on projects. Lots of them have unique ideas and want to develop valuable skill sets so they can work with drones in the future. We want them to gain the confidence to become a future Dronesmith, so we created an easy toolbox for them to start learning and creating – The Eedu Dronesmith Kit.
Assemble Eedu: Eedu is a drone that can be quickly assembled using the included tools. It is compatible with Arduino shields and other open source hardware.
Enter Forge: Once put together, Eedu is ready to be synced to Forge, the software part of the kit. Forge is a Robotics Development Environment (RDE) that runs on your web browser in the cloud. It brings together the best of ground control, community interaction, and code development. It will even teach you how to code! It is the world’s first complete community integrated development environment for drone applications. Best of all, it’s all open source, so anyone can contribute.
Fly your app: Once your app is built, it will compile on Eedu, and you are ready to try out your very own “homebrew!”
Safety Mechanisms: Designed with safety in mind. To minimize risk of injury, the propellers are custom designed out of lightweight, soft plastic alongside our intelligent speed controllers that automatically disable the rotors whenever something interferes with the propellers.
Core: Powered by Intel Edison. We have worked with Intel to integrate Edison into Eedu. Intel Edison is a powerful and capable dual core Atom computer that gives Eedu one of the most advanced processors available on any drone platform. Edison enables programs to easily be created on a full Linux OS, and with processing power to spare, to develop applications that will advance drones beyond current capabilities.
Documentation: Forge and the Intel Edison Linux Yocto recipe is provided as open source software. We will continue to work closely with the community to provide and maintain a repository for source code and documentation that supports the latest embedded frameworks and hardware APIs.
In addition to selling you the kit itself, we are also giving you the option to buy one for a student or to buy a classroom pack for our Inspire a Dronesmith Campaign.
More than ever, schools are having a hard time acquiring technology. We passionately believe that students’ accessibility to technology should not be hindered! As such, we are creating a donation fund that will allow us to distribute drones to schools across the nation. If you choose the Inspire a Dronesmith reward, your donated drone will be entered into the campaign pool that is used to award various schools that partake in our social campaign in Q3. By choosing to fund a Classroom Pack reward, you can specify the school that will receive the pack. Our team will take care of end-to-end distribution of these donations, and keep you informed throughout the delivery process.
This campaign will raise money to cover the cost of the initial manufacturing setup and the funding of software development. We are also initiating a message for people to invest in educational technology and enable future generation of Dronesmiths. We believe in order to be able to make drone technology more accessible to everyone, this kind of educational platform is needed – and we need your backing to support our belief!
Skyworks Aerial Systems (SkyworksAS) is comprised of recent college graduates who share a passion for drone technology and STEAM initiatives. We are an interdisciplinary team with expertise in electrical, computer, and mechanical engineering. We have collaborated together on various projects throughout our college and have great confidence in taking Eedu from prototype to production.
Establishing production and partnerships are the biggest challenges in projects like this. Taking a working prototype into mass production is complicated and high-risk. Delay in manufacturing is usually inevitable, and that’s why we have already initiated conversations and negotiations with various vendors and suppliers for the expected demand of the kickstarter. Our promise to our backers is that we will keep transparent and frequent communications to ensure you feel close to the whole development process and always keep backers informed about significant milestones. We are excited to create the best user experience for our backers.