7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, go! You guys, welcome to today's vlog number 99. This one is cool because we have a live model who's Madison, which is also our receptionist at the salon. So, pretty cool. I've never cut her hair before. What I wanted to do is show you guys a variation of the haircut that I've been doing with the twist cutting on top, but I wanted to show it to you on a live model so that you can see how it works on a real person as well. She's also got slightly wavy hair, so it's going to be really cool to see it that way as well. So, hope you guys enjoy this cut. Let's get started with our step by step. Here we go. Alright guys, so like I said at the beginning, this is our receptionist, Madison. So we're going to give her a haircut. She hasn't had a haircut in a really long time. She just started with us a couple months ago, so she's been holding out, waiting for a new cut. So what I did was I shampooed her first. Now the thing I noticed about Madison's hair right away is because she doesn't cut it very often. The ends are very, like, they were very frayed and weak. So what I wanted to do is put some strength into it. So I'm going to section off the haircut, and what I'm doing is creating a horseshoe section on the top. I really want to separate the top and the bottom for this cut. And then I'm going to separate just the midpoint. So right behind the ear, we're going to split that so that we are just sectioning off the front and the back and the top and the bottom of the head. So to create my sectioning, I'm using my YS Park 339 comb. The thing I love about this comb is it has that tooth in the very front that allows for easier partings and sectioning. So it keeps everything nice and clean. It's got nice, tight teeth, and then a little bit wider teeth on one end. So it's a very versatile comb. I use it in pretty much every cut as a standard. And then I branch off to other combs from there. So then right down center back, create my next parting. And then I go from the occipital bone right to behind the ear, slight diagonal forward, but not too far stretched forward. And just separate that point from the occipital bone to the low crown area and split that in half. What this is going to do is allow me to cut into the base of the hair. And where I talked about, you can see how that's kind of broken and weak. I'm also going to be using a cutting stool. And I'm just going to go in. I'm going to start to create that really strong baseline. So I see where the hair is weak. Madison didn't want to lose a lot of length. That's a very salon reality feeling. So I look at where the hair starts to look weaker. And that's where I start my line. With some people, this might have to be a little bit higher. Some people, it can be a little bit lower. We're taking about two inches off of our hair to get a clean line going, a nice solid base. And then we'll go through and start our layering after that. So I comb everything down a couple inches at a time, bringing more hair down to it. Using that as a stationary guide, using her back as a flat surface, and just creating that solid line through. The thing I like about using a cutting stool, we got our cutting stool at MinervaBeauty.com. The thing I like about using one is that it allows when you're working with somebody with longer hair. I'm a taller person, about six foot. So when I'm working on somebody, Madison's nice and tall, but she also has really a pretty long hair. So if I were to try to work without using a stool, I'd have to be bending my back quite a bit, and I'd be very uncomfortable. And like we talked about in past videos, the more uncomfortable you are, the more inconsistent your haircut will be. So I want to stay nice and comfortable. This is my favorite part right here. This is where we're going to start to add in the layering in the very back portion. So we go from basically the occipital bone up to the crown area, and I'm going to over direct it up. Now a lot of people when I did this on the mannequin before, they were like, this would be weird and uncomfortable if I had a guest sitting in a chair. Well, you can see right here that I take the hair, I bend Madison's head down. So it's actually a really comfortable position to create that layering, and you're doing condensed cutting. So it's allowing you a lot of freedom and quick technique. So in the salon, we talk about time being money and all of that and bringing value to what you're doing. So if I over direct that entire panel up, and cut it, it's going to give me nice uniform layers and in a quick result. So now the other thing that I'm going to do, and this is a little bit of a change from what we did on the mannequin. So if you watch vlog number 97, you'll see me do this cut on a mannequin. I don't over direct the hair forward like this, but what I'm doing with Madison is I'm creating a little bit more of a face frame, which I think will flatter her face a little bit more. So you have somebody that, I'm not trying to create too much separation in the face frame. I want it to wrap right underneath, about four inches underneath her chin and just kind of have it nice and soft there. So now we're going to work through the top. I create a horizontal section across. I grab a piece from the edge. You can see that little piece that I've left out there. That's going to be my guideline from the face frame. With Madison, I didn't want to create a short bang because she didn't want short bangs. So I go a little bit longer with the technique, which totally works. And I go through and I over direct the hair down, twist it and give it a cut. That twist, what that does is it over directs the hair on both sides. So it gives it kind of a U shape in the very front, which is a really nice soft feeling to the layering. Now, as I move through the back U section, I do a little bit heavier or not heavier, but higher elevation. And that higher elevation is going to remove a little bit extra weight. So as I move back on her head shape, I give it a little bit higher elevation as I work through it, gives me a lighter feeling. So here's the last section. You'll notice I don't grab the entire thing altogether, just a little bit at a time, use a little bit for my guide, over direct it forward and there we go. There is our technique. You see the layering. So I'm going through with the brush. What I want to do is use my Ergo paddle brush to just kind of pass through the hair. The other thing that I didn't mention is the scissor that I used to cut her hair. I used the DB20 scissor from Mizetani. It's the one that we sell on our website. I love that scissor, use it for everything. It's a 5.7 inch scissor. So anytime I'm doing precision cutting or cutting thicker hair, I like using a shorter blade and also that scissor is nanopowder metal which helps grip the hair and cut nice thick coarse hair really, really well. Great lines in it. So now I power dry her with the Dyson blow dryer and using the foam or the mousse in her hair. And then what I'm going to do is section off the top and then start working my round brushes. So I'm using the Ergo round brushes, a little bit wider brush. I didn't want to go too big with the round brush because that gives you more of a straighter look and I didn't want to go too small because I didn't want to create too much wave and curl in it yet. So this is the Joico thermal protectant they also sent me. And so I spray that in because I'm about 90% dry on the hair and then as I go through it I'm going to have that little bit of added protection in there. So there's my brush. You can see it's not a super wide round brush. I just want to get some volume and also polish the cuticle of the hair down. So I go through there over and over again you're going to see me working that brush. That's what gives it that shine you could see. So it makes your hair look nice and healthy. Gives it that shine and then I'm going to go through with an iron actually at the very end. So just kicking up that volume my brush is always elevating. If you think about hair cutting you elevate the hair. It gives it a nice light layered feel. It's the same with blow drying the more you elevate it the higher the volume is going to be the more light feel it's going to have towards the ends. Same thing I let it cool. I think a lot of people just quickly would take their brush out. You got to let it cool down a bit and then I kind of unwrap the brush so that I don't pull that curl out of there that wave that I've put in there. I even went back through in this section and did it again because I felt like it just didn't quite have that polish on it that I wanted. So you never want to skimp on something just go back in there and rework it. So last little bit on the side you'll notice everything's kind of coming off of the face. So my thought was if I iron or if I work the blow dryer and work the brush off of the face it'll open everything up. So now we move into the last section of the blow dry which is that U shape section. What I'm going to do is split that basically in half and as I work through the top the very first half of this section is going to be blown dry back towards me towards the back of the head and then the front part is going to be blown dry forward towards the face to give it maximum volume right in the very front but in the back I didn't need all that volume. Madison's already got a high density of hair she's got a lot of hair. So I wasn't worried about it not having the volume or the fullness but I did want to make sure that I was still lifting that brush nice and high working polishing from the base to the mid shaft to the ends and getting the look exactly the way I want it but I didn't need to get too much volume. Now if they had finer fabric of hair I might have rolled the entire top section forward which would have given me maximum volume but like I said with Madison's hair it's pretty good to go as long as you're giving it a little bit of that elevation throughout the blow dryer. The other thing I definitely, you know it's the elephant in the room I am using the Dyson blow dryer. Those of you that follow me know my stance on it I definitely like the blow dryer it is something that I use in the salon now. I didn't mind spending the extra money on it but I do believe that most professional dryers are just as good as this dryer the thing I like about it I like the lightweight feel of it I like anything that's new technology so I didn't mind spending money on that but I pretty much feel that you're paying for the new technology with that blow dryer I don't think it's necessarily that it's gonna blow dry your hair so much better than a professional dryer. I do strongly feel that you should not go cheap on a blow dryer though don't just run and grab a $20 blow dryer make sure that it has key benefits for your hair it's ionic and different things that it's not just blow drying your hair with extreme heat it's blow drying your hair with more modern technology so just make sure a key thing to know is if you're spending between $60 to $200 on a blow dryer you're gonna be pretty good to go and safe in that regard so last little bit like I said I'm blow drying everything forward wrapping it towards the face instead of away from the face what that's gonna do is give me that maximum volume in there and I wanted to really pop it up in the fringe area we did cut some of that face framing around so this is gonna give me all that volume that I'm looking for and if you guys aren't a hairdresser out there and you are watching this video and this could be the interesting part for you when we look at the blow dry I'm passing that blow dryer the nozzle is aiming down over top of the cuticle of the hair the air flow of the blow dryer should be passing down the hair strand that's gonna give you the most shine so you can see all those layers coming to life now I'm gonna go through this is actually a Palm Mitchell curling iron it's I think a one and a half inch iron I'm going through leaving the ends out even though they have a little bit of curl from the brush but I didn't wanna curl them so much cause I'm gonna pull those curls out at the end the trick here is to go through get that curl set let it cool and then you can run your hands through it and break it up later but you don't wanna pull and tug on it too much because you will lose the curl while the hair is still hot so same thing curling everything off of the face curling it back creating the style last few sections right on the top this again off of the face curling it back we already created the volume using the brush so this is really just to work the ends and the mid shaft and just to kind of give it that curl back each section I'm taking I'm kind of laying it on top of the other so it just gets it out of the way but you're not clipping it anytime you add a clip to the hair you start to bend it so I just wanna allow the hair to do its thing dry the, or cool down the way it's supposed to cool down and you'll get a better result there is the last one you can see all those curls see how healthy her hair looks now we definitely cleaned it up a lot it's like brought all new life to the hair so if you guys like this video definitely let me know in the comments below we're gonna finish it off this is I believe just a firm hold hairspray this is from Joyco as well just going through there separating the pieces pulling the hair out I don't, you don't wanna leave it curled the way it was so I like to stretch those curls out break them up give it a more natural feel so if you guys like it hit the like button let me know below if you have any questions thanks for watching All right guys like always if you liked the cut then hit the subscribe button hit the like button share this video with all of your friends out there and if you have any questions and post them in the comments below I love hearing your questions and also you guys know that I love seeing if you've made it this far in the video post that below as well thank you guys so much for watching I'll see you on the next video


In our print layout we have two maps, we have the main map which is map 1, you can find that under the item properties and if I select the locator map it's map 2, you can see that there in the item properties. Now the scale bar should be linked to one of them and of course it needs to be linked to the main map which is in our case map 1. If I change it to map 2 you see that it changes, it uses then the scale of the locator map. So you always need to choose the correct one. The same counts for the north arrow, if you scroll down then you find there in their image rotation that it has to be synced with a map and there you can also choose between map 1 and map 2. In this case it doesn't make any difference because they are both north oriented.


All right, everybody. Please give a warm welcome to Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine. Thank you. So today I'm not going to be talking about my day job. I'm going to be talking about what was once a hobby that has turned into something of an obsession and basically boils down to open sourcing the military industrial complex. So what could possibly go wrong? I'm going to start with basically a little story of how I got here, and then we'll get into the technology, some of the legal and business issues around it, where it's going, what it can do, and then hopefully we'll have time for questions. So let me just dive in. Again, I apologize for the, I think the images. I'm told this is out of my control, so we will deal. Five years ago my day job is running a magazine website, iPad, and all that. We get lots of products in for review. I also have five children, and I really want to get them excited about science and technology and have consistently failed year after year, possibly because I want them to be excited about science and technology. They're not, or possibly they're just not, they're just not geeks. I started a site which is now quite large in a company called Geek Dad specifically to try to find projects that you can do with kids that are fun for you and fun for them and sufficiently geeky, but my kids mock me and all my projects. However, five years ago on a Friday we got, in the office at Wired, we got some products in for review. There was a Lego Mindstorms Robotics Kit and a radio control airplane. And I thought, okay, this we can do. I know my kids are into Lego and planes are cool. So I brought them home and I said on Saturday, kids, we're going to build a robot out of Lego and on Sunday we're going to fly a plane. And they said, cool. So this is Saturday. This is Erin. She was, I think, about nine at the time. Eight at the time. And she opens it up. And you know, the instructions show you how to build a tripod, a little three-wheeled robot. It's really pretty great. I think it's awesome. This is Daniel. He's getting it working, etc. So we spent all morning building this thing. We then programmed it. And if any of you have experienced Lego Mindstorms, by the way, I love Lego Mindstorms. So it's on their advisory board. I think it's a wonderful thing. But if you have any experience with this, you will know the same thing that, oh, is this doing this to you as well? Okay, no. Anyway, you will see the same thing I did, which is that kids are really hard to impress, especially with robots.  And like, they've seen transformers. They know what robots are supposed to do. Where are the lasers? Why is it not three stories tall? It can't fight. So they were kind of disappointed by that. And I was a little annoyed by how disappointed they were and the whole beautiful programming language did nothing for them because there were no lasers. So then on day two I said, okay, fine, we're going to fly the plane. So this is what we had and we took it to the park and this is what happened. I launched it. It went into a tree and it wasn't so much the humiliating scene of Dad launching a plane into the tree. It was the absolutely mortifying scene of Dad climbing into the tree afterwards to dislodge it. I had to bribe them with ice cream after that. Anyway, so I was annoyed at them. They confirmed all their suspicions that geeky stuff isn't cool and I went for a run afterwards and I thought about the day and I thought the Lego mind storms came with these awesome sensors. It came with a gyro, accelerometer, magnetometer, a compass sensor, had Bluetooth connection so you could connect it to GPS. It had lots of processing power and I thought, you know what? You could probably almost fly a plane with that. You could probably almost make an autopilot with the Lego. So I came home and I said, kid, one last thing and we're going to sit on the dining table and we're going to make a Lego autopilot. And so this is what we, this is the first one we did that night. You can see it's totally hacked but those are the sensors, those little sort of square blobby things on the back. And I posted it to slash dot Lego UAV and it went on the front page and got lots of attention and the kids then kind of lost interest but I went right down the rabbit hole. So this was our first one. We put it in a plane and you can see, you know, it was really hard to interface the Lego with the radio control system because I didn't at the time have a way to do anything now but at the time it wasn't. So we actually used the Lego motors to move the whole servo back and forth on a little rail. Anyway, it kind of worked. We had a little Lego camera up hand tilt assembly on the bottom and Daniel did the programming and there it is in the plane. And then the next thing we did is we made it a lot better. This is one that's got a nine degree of freedom IMU, a inertial measurement unit with gyros accelerometers, magnetometer and a proper RC interface. And at this point I was really starting to sort of think this could actually happen. So we put this one in a plane and this one really did fly and is now in the Lego Museum action in Billund as the world's first Lego UAV. And I was hooked. The kids lost interest but I was hooked and I decided I was going to learn all about this. So I googled common filter and all this stuff and decided obviously Lego is a great way to start but it's not, not to be the right way to make an autopilot. And I kind of, you know, I went down the rabbit hole and started a site called DIY drones. And this is what I tend to do.  And if I ask dumb questions and to share my learnings in public, it turns out that it's kind of inviting for other people to join me. My ignorance about all this was an invitation to others to share their own learning and help teach me, etc. So today DIY drones is quite big. You can see the stats right there. But basically our philosophy is that drones, you know, that in your pocket is basically all the technology you need for a drone. In every one of your pockets you've got a smartphone, I presume. It's got gyros, it's got accelerometers, it's got GPS, it's got a magnetometer, it's got cameras, it's got processing, it's got wireless, it's got memory, it's got everything you need. With the right cable you can fly a 747, you know, more or less. And thanks to the economies of scale of the smartphone industry and the apples and Googles and etc., those chips are really, really cheap, like just a few dollars per. And so we've hit that moment where technology that ten years ago was military industrial classified stuff costing tens of thousand dollars is now in your pocket, this is MEMS technology, it's super cheap, it's super good, it's super accessible, it's easy to use and we're like, you know, it's time for the hackers to take over. So we started creating autopilots. This is one of our first ones. This is RGPilot Mega. It's based on the Arduino open source computing platform. And basically we just did a derivative of the Arduino mega board and then just did a layer on top that had all the sensors and all the necessary RC interfaces, radio control interfaces and all that. Our current boards look like this. This is the latest, greatest of the RGPilot series, it's called 2.5. You don't actually get it as a board, you get it in a little box like this. This costs $199. And basically you take this box and you put in any vehicle and it makes it autonomous. It is a magic autonomy box. It does planes, it does helicopters, it does multi-copters, it does cars, it does boats, I'm sure it does submarines, we haven't tried yet. But anything that's RC, you just put this in there and suddenly you've got a drone, fully autonomous, totally programmable, you know, telemetry, GPS, waypoints, the works. Which is pretty cool and it's 100% open source, open source hardware and software. We just yesterday released our latest version of this, which is PX4. This is done with ETH, the Technical University of Zurich, which is one of the best at unmanned aerial vehicle or drone research. And this one's got an ARM core, it's an M468 mega Hertz, it's a real serious processing power. It comes with all sorts of shields, including things like optical processing and this. So you may be heard of the Parade R drone, which is this really cool toy you can buy for $300. Unfortunately it's not really a drone. We define a drone as capable full autonomy. In other words, it flies itself. You can take over manual control if you want, but basically it is, you give it a mission. You, with a point and click, and I'll show you in a minute, you point and click on a mission planner, on a map, you say take off, go to these waypoints, loiter, take pictures, keep the camera, something, etc. So basically you look at the laptop or you just watch the video and the plane flies itself or the aircraft flies itself. That's what we call a drone. In other words, capable full autonomy. The Parade R drone is got fantastic hardware and software, but it's not autonomous. However, we just, yesterday, released this board, which will allow you to replace the closed source electronics, the AR drone, replace it with our open source, PX4 electronics, and make it a fully autonomous vehicle. So you may have heard a lot about these multi copters and quadcopters, and that's kind of the thrust of where a lot of us are going these days. I want to explain a little bit how these things work. You may be wondering why now, and the answer is that quadcopters are basically not, they're inherently unstable. They can't be flown by humans. They, you need to basically change the speed of the four propellers, and as you'll see later, there can be many more, change the speed of them about 100 or 200 times a second to keep it stable and also to move forward, left, right, up and down, and et cetera. Basically, two of the props go one way, and two of them go the other. And each one of them has a speed controller that can operate very fast.  When you want to go to the right, you speed up the one on the right, and slow down the one on the left.  And it's just physics, it's just math, but it's a solid state device, which is to say, with the exception of the motors themselves, it has no moving parts, which is really kind of awesome. Hopefully my screen will come back here. Just one second. There we go. You can also, once you see the math, once you understand the math, which is really just speeding up and slowing down props, you can sort of extend it. I hope this is showing. You can extend it to all sorts of other configurations. Six, eight. You can do those kind of V-shaped ones at the bottom are designed to make a very clear view for video. You can see the one at the bottom has six in two sort of stacks, which is again also to open up the space for the camera. And it's just a matter of kind of speeding up things and slowing down. No, it's very good for a computer to do and create a fantastic robotics platform for aerial robotics, which is technically hard. Anyway, it can only be done by computers. And until the introduction of these mem sensors and fast on board processors, this wasn't possible. So it's kind of been around for about ten years, and it's becoming the drone platform of choice because it is so flexible. And you don't have to. You can take off in your backyard and use it even in doors. So this is kind of the way it looks. We have these two big code bases. Arju copter for traditional helicopters and these multi copters and Arju plane for planes. And then we have a desktop software kind of mission planner. And what you do is you just take this board, you get this board, which comes with no software, and then you take this mission plan and you just click on which one do you want to turn this into an aircraft autopilot, an airplane autopilot, a quad copter autopilot, a traditional helicopter autopilot, or even a car autopilot. And you just press the button and it suddenly is reconfigured to that side of aircraft. So it's kind of a universal autopilot in that respect. And it's all because it's open source code created by a community that's been modified for all these different variants. This is the way mission planning looks. You just point and click on the mission planner and give each waypoint a certain task. It can loiter. It can obviously take off and land. It can change altitude of various sorts. It can keep a camera focused on a point of interest. You can tell it to follow. You can click and say go here in real time. Or you can just carry another device that looks like this, that has a GPS module and a little radio device. You've probably heard of XB radios. We have our open source variants called the 3DR radio, which is half the price. And don't mention open source.  So one of the things we're looking at here is with extreme sports going to, let's say you've got a kite surfer or wind surfer.  Just this kind of robo-camera or personal droid and then when the battery gets low it'll fly itself home. That's the kind of stuff that you can do with full autonomy. I want to explain a little bit about how we're part of the open source hardware movement and I want to explain a little bit about how this works. It's kind of complex. It has to be a manufacturing component to it. So what manufacturing costs money and there's real dollars associated with the equipment and the components and all that. So DIY drones is an open source community that's free and it creates all the software. So the bits are free and created by volunteers. The atoms, i.e. the physical hardware is created by a spin-off company we created called 3D Robotics and we create sort of generic boards, computing boards and then the community creates the software that gives them intelligence and useful function. This kind of mix of the two and you see many others. The Arduino project is another example of that. MakerBot is another example. Adafruit, Sparkfun, Seed Studios there's a whole bunch of other open source hardware communities out there and they all tend to have that same approach. Give away the bits sell the atoms. Community builds the software, does documentation does support a for profit company does the hardware support and all the kind of customer support around that and seems to work pretty well. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit. I want to then talk about how we migrated to the point where we're making pretty sophisticated electronics and this is the cover of Make Magazine which is kind of the bible of our movement and last year they featured drones and the guy on the front is Jordy Munoz. I'll tell you a little story about how I met him. So when I started DIY drones again I knew nothing and people were just posting their hacks they're posting the projects and this one guy posted this hack by which he flew a helicopter with a Wii controller and he showed the video and it was really kind of cool and he used Arduino as the interface between the two and I thought this was awesome and I asked him how it worked. He told I hadn't heard of Arduino before and this was four years ago or so and he told me all about it. I had been using the basic stamp which turns out to be wildly inappropriate for these purposes. It doesn't have a floating point among other things. So it's really looking for a new computing platform and he turned me on to it very early in the project and so we became part of the Arduino project as a result and then we started doing these projects. We did a blimp called BlimpDuino. We did our first plane and I said you know what we're going to have to start a company to make the hardware because it's not enough to post the files and links to where you can buy components of Digi-Key etc. You actually have people want you know people if a soldering iron is involved you're going to eliminate a lot of the potential users. So we need to take soldering irons out of the equation. We need to do the soldering for them. We need to build a manufacturing company so let's go in business together and he said great terrific and I said okay so tell me a little something about yourself Jordy. We never met and he turned out to be at the time 19 years old from Tijuana, Mexico graduated from high school but not college was just in his apartment waiting to get a green card and was kind of bored which is why he was doing the helicopter thing and today he's the CEO of a multi-million dollar robotics company and I just what I love about this is that he was the perfect person for this job. He understood open source hardware he understood open source software he understood robotics he was incredibly smart and he was you know willing to try things and hack in public and share YouTube videos and charismatic and turns out he had all sorts of connections into the Mexican engineering world which turned out to be awesome but you know what are the odds that you know 10 years ago when the editor-in-chief of Wired decides to start a drone company that will end up with a Mexican teenager and the answer is zero 10 years ago and today it makes perfect sense and that's what I love about this is that we largely find the best people find us and today we have some of our community members work for Apple by day or Google by day and they contribute to our projects by night and we have people from around the world and we never would have found these people but they found us because we didn't public in a community. So this was our first we started obviously in a dining room table in a garage etc. and then a little storage facility so this was our first factory and today it looks like this it's just one of our two factories this is the one in San Diego we have a parallel factory in Tijuana right now for reasons I'll talk to you in about a minute but we have more than 50 employees you know a multi-million dollar operation we're only two years old and this is you know this is now competing in the aerospace industry by building on open source hardware by having communities do so much of the R&D we're able to accelerate the innovation path incredibly fast and build a real business model around open source because hardware intrinsically has a revenue model attached you sell things for more than they cost I'll talk a little bit more about the business model in a second just briefly you can get this slide online it's too much to see right now but open source hardware is a lot harder than open source software the formats involving CAD files and printed circuit board files etc. are complex and often based on proprietary standards the version control doesn't really know how to do diffs for CAD files and other complex design files the metadata is just all this stuff that's much more complex than text the physical properties what the authoring tools were the parametric qualities of the data the electrical qualities the sources of the components much more complex than just simple ASCII and code and the skills needed are just incredibly wide we need analog electronics digital electronics hardware engineering RF engineering design documentation CAD skills 3D printer skills aeronautics skills it goes on and on and on we've learned a lot about this world but we never could have done it had we not done it in public on a community our business model is really simple we as I say give away the bits and we sell the atoms we charge 2.6 times the bill of material times the underlying cost of the product and 2.6 is kind of a magic number it could be 2.4, 2.5 but basically it allows one 40% margin for us as the manufacturer and another 40% margin for retailers and what it also means that it's much much cheaper than closed source stuff so an autopilot that the military would sell for $10,000 or maybe $50,000 and even any closed source company would sell for $5,000 or $10,000 will sell for somewhere between $1,200 and that's because the underlying components cost so little thanks again to the cell phones and then the economies of scale of the cell phone industry and we don't charge for intellectual property and our R&D is largely free because it's done by a community and that is just an amazing advantage and 2.6 is a healthy business for us but it's orders of magnitude cheaper than commercial, closed source and God knows military technology and that's incredibly disruptive when we release our files we release them in their native design format and within 7 days the Chinese have cloned us we allow them to do this our license allows for commercial reuse how can we be in business when we give our cloners our files and permit them to clone us and the answer is they can't clone our community and we innovate really fast and good luck to them for keeping up what they don't know is what's coming next and so they can undercut us by about 30% so not that much actually but what they don't know is that we've got another product coming out next week and etc so they're taking some risk also if you buy from them you're taking some risk because our community won't support you and who knows what the quality is so we think that the real secret sauce of open source hardware is the community around the products the community creates the products the community supports the other community members and that is hard to clone that allows open source hardware to be truly open without undermining the business models of those who put up the money to do the manufacturing we try to get I say 90% the performance of commercial UAVs at 1% the price we'd like to get 110% the performance of commercial UAVs at 1% the price or 0.1% of the price we're not sure it's even that hard the innovation model of open source hardware is so advanced and so efficient and productive what takes Lockheed sometimes six years and tens of millions of dollars to develop we can do in a year for basically essentially zero dollars now it's not as good as theirs theirs is definitely better theirs is more robust theirs is mil-spec theirs is tested theirs is verified and certified 90% is good at 1% the price and maybe 1.5th the time or 1.6th the time is a really interesting approach and the point is that the gap is shrinking we there's a whole market out there which I'll talk about of people who would be interested in aerobotics but are not in the traditional markets of the military and that's what we're interested in regulation is fascinating by being open source this is a highly regulated industry these are flying vehicles it's got the FAA, the FCC the State Department the Department of Commerce this thing right here the export control rules that were written in the 1970s these things are qualified as munitions the cruise missile controllers it was interesting that as is often the case with export control the rules are written long ago are made mockery of by technologies advanced when my 9 year old wrote the code for that lego autopilot and he posted online we later determined he had weaponized lego legally that was weaponizing lego by the way that line made it to the front page my son is completely unimpressed by all of this but that particular line made it to the front page of failblog and he's really impressed by failblog so he's he had a brief personal pleasure there however there is an exemption in the export control rules for public domain and one of the nice things about open source is again it depends a little bit on the kind and the implementation and who did it etc but the way we do it is and we have legal ruling on this legal opinion on this qualifies as a public domain exemption so we're not regulated in the same way the FAA has rules that let you fly drones in the airspace commercially but you can fly it non commercially as amateurs so commercially you have to get what's called a certificate of authorization which takes like a year and basically there's a handful of them issued every year you can't get one but if you're flying non commercially and you stay under 400 feet within visual line of sight so you can basically accomplish that the gold standard of FAA's airspace control is what's called sense and avoid ability to see if there's another aircraft in your airspace and avoid it if necessary to protect people if you are on the ground because these aircraft, oh by the way micro drone I'll tell you about this in a second if you are if you are in this thing you don't have eyes on board you may have a video on board but it's not the same thing you don't have the same peripheral vision so you need to be on the ground you need to be able to see it so that you can do the sense and avoid for it that it can't do itself so we comply with those regs we stay away from built up areas stay away from other people etc we comply with that and as a result my children can fly drones in the park on weekend or perhaps other children who are more interested in this than mine although mine can be bride with ice cream to do it so they can fly drones in the park on the weekend but the university we live next to Berkeley can't fly drones the smallest children in the world can and I think that's just awesome because what it suggests is that there is a place in the regulations for amateurs and amateurs do some of the coolest stuff for the FCC stuff because we don't sell directly to end users in blister packs in Walmart we sell to developers we're not responsible for that final FCC verification of RF interference etc we do comply with liability stuff no money changes hands so traditional liability doesn't apply there for the hardware it does we have liability insurance you might imagine when you're asking insurance company for liability insurance you don't use the word flying robot said electronics that's what we were insured against we comply with all EPA rules about limiting lead and that kind of stuff but basically the point is that one of the biggest barriers to innovation in things like the aerospace industry is regulatory barriers and if you're a small company and you want to build drones in closed source you can't you can't fly, you can't export you can't do any of that stuff if however you're open source and you want to give away the technology and you want to build commodity hardware that uses software created by the internet you can and that's great what that means is that open source is tunneled through the regulatory barriers routed around the red tape and otherwise allowed innovation to flourish and to get this technology out of the hands of the military into the hands of regular folks and that's been the real lesson of our experience with the open source hardware movement it is incredibly disruptive, incredibly transformative and maybe someday we'll be sued or we'll find out that we're infringing on some patent and we'll just have to adapt we'll have to route around it, we'll have to figure out what to do but so far so good it's the best innovation model we've ever seen this is how we reward our developers the first time you commit you get a t-shirt that's something it's a physical good it could be just one line and you get that second time if you do a sustained contribution you get a coffee mug t-shirt and a hardware discount if you accept a role as a team leader you get free hardware if you're a core team leader of one of the key projects we pay for your travel to the dev meetings once a year and for the team leaders who've shipped a major product we give them equity in 3D robotics as a company I don't know whether and this has ever been done before that an open source hardware company has constructed their legal structure so they can give equity grants or options to volunteer contributors in the open source community but we think this is the way to go so now that we've done this a couple years we think open source hardware is just magical I mean it's free and fast R&D basically think of it this way this is kind of a little kind of a crude way to put it but we ship kind of okay stuff we ship a board that doesn't have much function and it isn't really perfect to the customers they pay us for the board then they contribute the code that makes it better they feedback the suggestions that improve the board both in the dev teams and the community as a whole we then incorporate the suggestions sometimes they actually ship us they do the design for us and give us their designs we then manufacture them and then we sell them back to them again they do their own customer support I mean obviously we have our own hardware support but the community they do most of the customer support is done by other users etc so the idea of and by the way half of the products we ship we now have more than 150 of them products came from the community themselves people had ideas they made designs and they just needed someone to put them into production they give them to us we then kind of our engineers work with them to make them manufacturable to you know ensure they use components efficiently economically efficient etc and then we then we sell them and then we put them into production and we sell them to the community at the lowest possible price and we think this model of community based development or co-creation as you called is just incredible and it seems to make everybody it seems to work for everybody things get out there faster they get out there cheaper the community's ideas there's a path for them to show up in the marketplace and we can out compete some of the biggest aerospace companies in the world because we have an army of passionate volunteers behind us as I mentioned we're exempted from ending the regulatory barriers the business model I know the business model of open source software is always a little tricky it's super easy right we sell products for more than they cost and organically profitable on day one we haven't taken a penny of investment it's super there's lots of ways you can go wrong you get your inventory wrong quality assurance wrong etc but in terms of the business model it's like head slapping the obvious people keep coming like business professors keep saying can you explain your business model and we're like a 17th century British fishmonger could explain our business model we sell products for money and we charge more than it cost us they're like wait now say that again yeah that's really it it's just regular business now those products are cheaper to make because of our innovative innovation model thank you open source software and all of you and the generations that have come before us but the business model is just again head slapping easy and although our products are never perfect they improve very very fast again because of the with all enough eyes all bugs are shallow phenomenon and that sort of agreement that the community will help us make the products better and in exchange we will get those improvements out fast is the sort of secret sauce of what we're doing here so this is really where we're going this is the drone market out there tens of millions of dollars for global hawk millions for predators and reapers hundreds of thousands of dollars for scanning these are all military grade things tens of thousands of actually hundreds of thousands of dollars for ravens and global hawks and things like that or sort of the desert hawks the packages that you see in Afghanistan beyond and this is kind of where we're going right now all of our drones cost under a thousand dollars and we do tens of there's more than ten thousand out there the military has about eight to ten thousand drones and in America alone globally we probably have about twenty thousand drones we the amateurs have more drones than the military has now ours cost six hundred dollars and theirs cost six million dollars and ours are constrained to those FAA regs and theirs can go anywhere and ours absolutely are not weaponized and theirs are but nevertheless in terms of getting drones out there we're doing it this mount model is working we're democratizing the technology so that's where we are right now in the sort of the sub thousand dollar market we think that the next thing is basically to put this autopilot thing in any radio control vehicle any air one they should just be built in right we have this thing called geofencing where what you do in that mission planner I showed you you just define a box just draw a box and give it a floor and a ceiling so it's a three dimensional box and then you turn on geofencing and it won't fly out of the box and then you give your radio control to like a five year old and what happens they go it hits the virtual floor and it takes control back away from the five year old brings it back right to the middle of the box then gives control back to the five year old they can't crash the plane and it won't fly away and this is I think should just be built into any radio any vehicle should of course have this function we have the intelligence technology we have the GPS we have the sensors why should anyone ever crash again and there's other variants of it if you get if you're feeling you're losing control you just let go of the stick and the planes then just take over their own control so we think that sort of tens of dollars what now costs you know between like a little less than $200 should cost less than $100 and should be built into any kind of RC unit and then fundamentally this is going to go this is going to be single dollars and it's going to look like this this is the smallest quadcopter around it's actually a commercial one made by the Chinese it's made by a company called Wakara but it's hackable but just the systems integration on this is an example of where we're going to be going I mean you've seen swarming swarming quads indoors well you know that costs those things are incredibly expensive those motion capture systems the Vicon system costs at least $100,000 and often more we'd like to open source all of that the copters, the code the motion capture etc and we want to do it outdoors as well with onboard optical imaging GPS RF control inter aircraft mesh control etc we want to open source all of it and get you know make the sky dark with these things so we're having fun there are some hard parts in open source hardware as I say we need to create this architecture of participation we need to make it easy like a great game it should be easy to pick up but hard to master because open source hardware is so complex and there are these seven layers of you know CAD files etc all beyond the code itself it's harder to get the architecture of participation right but we're making process we're making progress there are many legal questions no one has told us that what we're doing is legal we have legal opinion to believe that it is we have lots of precedent we talk to the government all the time but nobody knows frankly in terms of patents who knows we may be violating something we don't know there's just so many patents out there and when it happens we'll deal with it the tools for collaborating are a little limited and as I say we deal with piracy all the time we protect our trademarks we protect our intellectual property beyond that and not everybody can compete with the Chinese with the open source model and who knows someday we may find that we can't either but so far so good the military and the US government likes what we're doing the Pentagon has been in touch with us constantly we're constantly briefing military agencies I get a quarterly checkup by the FBI they're happy so far we'll see how that goes the White House has been impressed enough to ask DARPA and the others to use our model for the future military UAVs and so DARPA based on the competition model that you saw with the Grand Challenges DARPA Road Race and others this year created an open UAV competition called UAV Forge that was built on the DIY Drone's Model and they just had their first year of competition there and nobody passed all the test as they didn't with the road race either but I think they will in the years to come so the White House wants to use this open innovation model for even military stuff we don't do military we won't do military but we're very happy with people in any sectors using our model to lower the cost of innovation and speed it up as taxpayers this is a good thing but I wanted to end just with one note before I take questions which is that I think the analogy right here really takes us back about 30 years when you look at the IBM PC the first one from the 1980s you ask where did that come to be how did that come to be did IBM scale down the main frame or did they scale up the homebrew computing club hacker boards and the answer is yes this is the first Apple too but what happened in the late 1970s is just what happened now which is that the essential technology in that case it was the CPU the 8088s and the Xilog chips and those initial processors became cheap and available and open to all and suddenly a technology that had been a military industrial technology which was computers which were originally designed for things like artillery shell calculations became open to anybody now do we know what to do with them initially no we just hacked them we programmed them etc but over time we changed the world I think the same thing is now happening in the physical world with things like Arduino Raspberry Pi with the Moore's law of sensors that are being driven by your smart phone technology what you have in your pockets right now is an underutilized hardware platform those phones you know this it can do so much more we're just scratching the surface of it and what we're doing is we're just adding the power of open source to all of that so this is how you can find out more information DIY drones is the site 3D robotics is the commercial side those are my handles but thank you very much and I'll take some questions thank you so I think we have microphones here on the sides and we're also going to have a Q&A session afterwards so please come up to a microphone and yes sir thank you though I've seen camera systems integrated into Arduino based flight systems and already are there plans for 3D robotics to provide a autonomous camera system? Autonomous camera system yeah so when you say autonomous camera we already do camera control so the drones control the cameras with the pan and the tilts and the zoom etc we also offer an optical flow imaging system so it can do it again with a airdrone offers and that PX4 platform I described earlier there's a really powerful image processing unit that we'll be releasing quite soon on that which will do onboard optical and image processing I'm from North Carolina State University I'm participating in the international area robotics competition we're going to open source all of that stuff basically every technology along the chain we're opening an image processing is the next frontier look for the PX4 image board to be out within about a month alright thank you thank you just the one mic it is the one mic hi Chris Romeo Espana I'm actually a community member I'm thankful to see you guys come out to DEF CON so far everything we've been doing has been with 2.4 rate of hobby RC controllers I've done we've done a little bit of work with the XPs flying over the telemetry link how big is the push going over to flying and controlling these drones over IP so using a flying over IP internet protocol so an onboard GSM modem or something right now we support a couple things you don't need an RC system although we do recommend it for safety's sake you can fly with XB you can fly with our open source XB versions which are called the 3DR radios you can fly with GSM although the latency is a little too slow for manual one of the deals with the FAA regs is that you have to be able to take over manual control that's what the pilot and control sense and avoid means so we won't let you fly just with GSM in the United States because you have no way to take over manual control because the latency is too slow for that link but we do have an Android board called the phone drone that will interface with an Android phone or other device and if you can get the latency down and can fly at home manually and again it'll fly itself so you're really just directing it that is enabled so yes you can fly Android yes you can fly XB yes you can fly 3DR radios you can pick your frequency etc 3DRC if you don't want it and every element of that is open source any push for a video over IP I'm sorry any push for a video over IP for the FPV guys an open source video radio the Chinese make great ones and they're analog and they work fine it isn't a high priority they cost 35-40 bucks so it hasn't been a high priority for us thank you I know we probably aren't sure yet but what are the practical applications of drones can you talk a bit about that the practical applications are initially things visual aerial photography aerial videos search and rescue border patrol mapping the nice thing about drones is you have anywhere anytime access to the sky so you can be below the clouds for example a lot of people using drones for agriculture as a farmer you want an aerial view of your crops you can see it in infrared you can see the water distribution you can see how healthy the plants are and just pick your spectrum and then more of the points you want a daily view so just putting a drone on a daily kind of a lawnmower pattern over your land with real time data satellites so those are the initial ones I mentioned extreme sports and the robo video those are fun as well but by and large most of the applications involve visual video and photography and a little bit of scientific sensing for now yes sir would you repeat the name of the Chinese quad that you held up this one is made by a walker would you spell walker walker thank you hi I have another question about applications I'm an RC hobbyist geek and a hacker and I guess of all the talks at DEF CON this one scares me the most I have to ask you do you feel like you've opened Pandora's Box to a dystopian future yeah I get that a lot open Pandora's Box what future it will bring we don't know so yes we've absolutely taken this technology that used to be military industrial classified technology and we have given it to the world including the bad guys I assume we don't discriminate against anybody we don't block any countries for software our software is on Google code they may block certain countries North Korea but we don't here's the thing it was already out there back in the day the first of the open source sophisticated open source something called paparazzi which was started maybe seven or eight years ago and it's still around so there were examples of this before and to be honest if my nine year old can do it it's not that complex it got classified so it's not that easy either but we just don't discriminate we kind of figure it's a tool we think it will be used more for good than for ill we do advocate really responsible use and we don't allow irresponsible use we don't allow any discussion of weaponization we actually will call our friends in the government if anyone on our community starts talking about doing something really really dangerous and we've done that a few times and we tell our community that we're going to do that more in the ahead of time but computers can be used for ill and for good so we kind of think that it's not our place to judge what people will do and if we're going to put the technology out there we want to put out there in an open context in an open community so at least those who are charged with protecting us can see what's going on and we invite the NSA and the CIA and all the others into our community to watch what's going on so that they can do their job of being informed about dangers and we can do our job of promoting innovation cool thank you very much what do you think the future of the regulations are going to be regarding this are you going to be regulated out of business one day? the answer is the FAA is going through a process to modernize the regulations and they've got a target of 2015 they'll probably miss but what they want to do is bring a class of UAVs make it possible as I say right now commercial use in the national airspace is pretty much impossible and they want to create a de minimis class it won't be as this small but basically ours are typically about this big or maybe that big they want to make a class of UAVs that are basically not going to bring down a jetliner they tend to be out of what's called non-friable materials, foam they're under two pounds etc and for that class that's in the United States and Europe is going through a similar path as for things like export control as again we opened our second production facility in Mexico and our community is on the internet so the point is that we're not really an American entity they can shut me down they can put me in jail they can bring my nine-year-old in front of congress for weaponizing lego they can shut down our U.S. operations if they want but the community is global and outside of I think any particular country's bounds and again our production facilities have now moved to Mexico so we're not even covered by ITAR anymore so we'll see I know the regulations are going to change and I'm expecting we may have to fill out some paperwork especially for people using the UAVs rather than making them we feel we're as insulated as we have prepared as possible for any regulatory eventuality so that whatever they do they won't stop the project they won't stop the community and they won't stop the technology they can stop me but they can't stop their own thanks hey Chris I'll make this quick 20 years ago radar guns brought radar detectors obviously talk about business and that'll be as quick so you have what you have in-home drone detector because I mean if I'm going to have all these 300,000 floating around which my distance, which my care you start manufacturing those as well to guarantee protection so if you got like 50 million running around my location I at least know that I'm picking up at least a couple of them anyway I wasn't sure I completely followed the question radar guns people started selling radar detectors started selling that process in order to counteract it basically anybody can use this technology for whatever they want and I'm sure they'll think of things I haven't thought of by the way that'll have to be the last question sorry I will be around afterwards so you can ask questions to me personally yes absolutely using drones to look at the military to turn the cameras back on the police back on the state this is absolutely what people are going to do being able to look for traffic spots I'm sure it's a perfectly good use the point is that this technology like the military invented the internet but we figured out what to do with it the military invented computers but we figured out what to do with it the military invented drones but we're going to figure out what to do with it and there will be a zillion applications that I have not thought of yet but the way it's going to happen is by making them cheap easy accessible and ubiquitous putting in the hands of people with great ideas and let them show us what they could do thank you very much


I've had four totally different RVs since I've been full-time on the road and so today I'm going to tell you the pros and cons of each one, what I've learned about them and all kinds of stuff you might want to consider if you're in the market for an RV. Happy Sunday Birdwatchers! It's Robin with Creativity RV and like I said today I'm going to be comparing my four totally different rigs which include a B plus camper van, a class C, a fifth wheel and a truck camper. And I've been meaning to do this video for a long time and really quick let me thank my patrons for inspiring me. This is video number two in my new series, How to Save Money and Be Happy by Living in an RV. But quick programming note, you'll notice that I'm still in my fifth wheel because I'm actually having a mechanical issue on my truck. I have the dreaded death wobble on my forward. The good news is that it gives me a chance to get out a couple of other videos that I've been meaning to do from the fifth wheel and I'm going to be telling you about my new composting toilet install and after that about my mouse infestation which I am fighting in here right now and then after that I'm going to tell you all about all the repairs that have had to be done in all these four rigs and that video is a good follow up to this video because it also might help you in making a choice in RVs. And also let me get this out of the way right now. I was not sponsored in any of these rigs. Nobody gave me an RV. I went out and bought every single one of these rigs because I love being on the road. So really quick, let me break down for you why I switched rigs and also how that worked for cost and the depreciation. You know, somebody mentioned in the comments on my last video which was on budget that I didn't mention depreciation which is a real cost. Well, that doesn't really go into a monthly budget but yeah, you have to consider depreciation. So the first rig that I had when I was on the road was a leisure travel van. I didn't just want it because of the footprint and because of how it looked but I also chose that rig because it doesn't depreciate as much as other rigs do. When I had the leisure travel van, which is great if people have LTVs out there, but for me, and I'll go over this more in the Whopper Repairs video, I had a major water leak and on top of that I had major electrical issues and those two things do not work well together. So I got rid of that one and then I made the mistake of jumping too quickly into my next one which was a Tiffin Wayfarer. Now again, I know that there are like rabid Tiffin fans out there. Tiffin is known as a high-end brand for their class A's but they got into the class C market. That's what I got and if I'd done more research I would have found out that there were some problems with that in the Tiffin. I had major structural issues like literally my walls were coming apart. I got rid of that one and by the way, I did come to some agreements with those two manufacturers which I'm not going to go into here but that also helped with the cost when I moved on to another rig. When I was getting rid of the Tiffin, my lifestyle was changing a little bit because I thought my boyfriend at the time might come on the road with me so I chose this fifth wheel that I'm in now as a long-term vehicle and I'm glad I did. I love this fifth wheel. I had it on my own for about a year on the road before my boyfriend came with me. He was on the road with me for a year and then went back to the sticks and bricks. When that happened, the fifth wheel seemed like a lot to me and you know some women cut their hair when they have a breakup. I decided to get a new RV. A couple of years ago when we were hunkered down in the desert during COVID, we decided it was a good time to renovate the RV and like right here where my camera is, we got rid of the couch and I have a big desk and it's nice and bright in here. We got rid of the brown. You guys can actually see videos on that in the past and how we painted and everything in here and so I love it and when I switched to the truck camper, I really didn't want to get rid of the fifth wheel because long term I still wanted to hang on to it. So as I mentioned before, the fifth wheel is mostly in storage and I travel in the truck camper. Now I have done a video before and an article on my blog about how to negotiate the best deal on your rig and how to account for depreciation and also to see you know what the market will allow and how much wiggle room you have when you go into negotiations. So I'll put a link down in the description to a blog post that I did that actually has a bunch of resources. So for my first rig, the Leisure Travel Van, there was more demand in the market than there were actual RVs to buy so when I switched that one over to the Tiffin, it was a wash and then when I switched the Tiffin over to the fifth wheel, I actually got about $24,000 back but of course I had to buy a truck so that went into the truck and the truck camper was $20,000. It's a 2019 Lance 1191. I got it because I wanted to go more off-road and I wanted to be more nimble and it was a good space for just me alone. So for this video, I went back and calculated the total depreciation across the five and a half years I've been on the road from rig to rig to rig and basically in depreciation I've lost $5,500 a year. That's a lot less than rent. So I think $5,500 a year is pretty good. I mean honestly that's like three months rent where I come from. Okay now I'm going to go through five things that I can compare between the rigs including gas, water, weight, drivability, that kind of thing and then I'm going to go into other things that you probably want to consider when you're buying an RV and you do not want to miss that part. When it comes to gas mileage, the Leisure Travel Van was the hands down winner. It was on a Sprinter Mercedes chassis and I got over 22 miles to the gallon. I mean which was just a gift. It was almost like driving a car. The Tiffin was the same footprint as the Leisure Travel Van. They were both 25 feet long. The difference is that the Tiffin was a Class C so it had the overhang over the front and that one only got 16 miles to the gallon.  Diesel is nine miles to the gallon and with the truck camper which is also massive, it's 12 feet long and hangs over the end of my truck. With that one I get maybe 11 miles to the gallon. My truck alone gets about 14.3 miles to the gallon without anything on it. The next thing I want to compare is water storage. Now if you're going to be a boondocker and that means you're not hooked up at an RV park and you have to go out and camp and bring everything with you, how much water you can carry in your rig is a huge deal and it also goes into weight which is going to be the next thing I talk about which honestly I think is the most major thing to consider when you're purchasing an RV but let's talk about water first. My leisure travel van had a freshwater tank of 30 gallons. The Tiffin Wayfarer had a tank of 38 gallons. The fifth wheel is the winner in this category because it holds 93 gallons of fresh water and the layout's truck camper holds 35 gallons. You might be wondering how much water I actually use when I'm out boondocking and my truck camper which is 35 gallons, I can go for two weeks on that water but I'm very frugal with the water. How I do my dishes and how I shower and all that stuff matters when you're trying to make that 35 gallon stretch. In the fifth wheel for two people that 93 gallons would last us two weeks for all the dishes and the showers and the drinking water and just for reference I can go through 100 gallons when I'm hooked up at an RV park in three days if I'm not being frugal. You know if I'm taking really long showers every day and I let the water run while I'm doing the dishes and that kind of thing and that might be what you're used to in a house just for some reference but you know if you want a boondock you figure out how to make it work. Now here's the important thing to know about water. It's heavy. Water I think weighs 8.3 pounds per gallon I'm sure you guys will correct me if I have that off a little bit. When I was getting ready to go on the road and I watched a bunch of YouTube videos nobody ever talked about weight and I had no point of reference and I didn't really understand how important it was and I'll tell you I learned real fast how important it was. In fact out of everything I'm talking to you about today I think weight is the most important thing because especially if you're a full timer it will determine how much stuff you can bring with you on the road safely. Now this isn't a video about weight but I am going to be going through three basic definitions so you can understand how the carrying capacity changes. When you go to buy an RV inside of one of the bay doors normally you're going to see a yellow sticker it's required by law that says GVWR which is gross vehicle weight rating. GVWR is the maximum weight that you can carry in your rig fully loaded and remain safe. The next definition or acronym that you might see when you look at an RV is UVW. Now it's important to know that this may vary by manufacturer some might count the batteries or something some might not but for most manufacturers the UVW includes the basic weight of your RV plus a full tank of gas and maybe engine fluids and maybe propane and sometimes just to make it more confusing you're going to see some people talking about dry weight or a sticker that has dry weight. Dry weight is almost the same as UVW except for it doesn't include the fluids so it's just basically the rig. The next thing and the most important thing if you want to go full time is something called OCCC which is occupant and cargo carrying capacity. Now this is all the stuff that you're going to add into your rig. Now water is a huge component of this right the bigger your water tank the more of course it's going to weigh so for example in the fifth wheel I can hold 93 gallons I'd have to multiply that by 8.3 and add that in to my OCCC but not only that I have to add in the weight of people the weight of the fluids in the gray tank and in the black tank if you have that the weight of the water in your water heater and then all your food and all your stuff and look if you're thinking of going full time it's not like you pack some clothes for the weekend and your fishing pole and you're out the door you have to have everything with you that you might need on the road and there are a lot of people and me included when I first started that said oh there's no way my stuff is going to weigh more than 500 pounds it does it weighs a lot and if you want to know how much weight you're carrying in your RV it's really simple all you have to do is go to a truck stop for about 10 bucks they'll let you get on the truck scales now let me break down for you how much weight I could carry in each one of these rigs the GVWR on the Tiffin as an example was 11,030 pounds now that seems like a lot right but then you have to take the UVW which is the weight from the manufacturer out of that that was 98.95 then I had to consider the weight of the leveling jacks and the solar panels on the roof and then that water tank is 300 pounds of water and if there's a couple of people let's say 350 pounds that only left 335 pounds of stuff that I could bring with me it's really hard to stay under weight if you're a full timer in a rig like this especially if you have two people now let's look at the Tiffin I only have 850 pounds left to carry and so then I have to consider again the water the people the fuel the tanks the stuff now for me if I was going to consider it again I'd have to think really hard about getting a Mercedes Sprinter they're great and I know a lot of people love them I know a lot of people don't because they're difficult to repair they're expensive to repair and they just aren't burly enough they don't carry a lot of weight now on the fifth wheel of course it got a lot better because the gvwr on the fifth wheel is 15,000 pounds the UVW was 12,100 and that left me a whopping 2,300 pounds I could carry in my fifth wheel after I had a ton of solar added now in my truck camper you have to calculate this a little bit differently because it depends on what your truck can carry what you want to look for here is the payload rating if you're looking at a truck camper it's really important so inside the door of your truck you're going to see a sticker that says something like the combined occupant and cargo total should not exceed x number of pounds that's your payload capacity now I'm lucky because I have such a big truck my payload capacity is 3,580 I don't remember exactly what the lance weighs but I think it's 1800 or 1900 pounds so I have to take that out of that number and then what's left is what I can load which is a lot because the weight is on top of the truck instead of being pulled behind the truck which is a benefit but of course the truck camper is small and I can't hold a lot of water so I don't go anywhere close to going over capacity in the truck camper which is a bonus so look if you're going part-time weight rating might not be as important but if you're going to be a full-timer it is wicked important okay now let's talk about drivability when I first started my dad actually thought I should get a travel trailer and I remember I was like I couldn't possibly do a travel trailer because I don't know how to hook that up and there's a sway bars and it's scary and it fish tails and I don't know how to do that and I think that's why I gravitated more towards the B plus because it seemed like it was easier to drive and I'll tell you the B plus was easy to drive when it wasn't windy yeah it gets great gas mileage it does great driving through a city I can drive into a grocery store parking lot no problem but in the wind the tiffin and the leisure travel van were blown all over the road I wouldn't drive normally if it was over like 13 miles an hour for the wind now if you saw my video on learning to drive the fifth wheel it was really easy I couldn't believe it was like nothing after about an hour and the wind would have to get up to about 23 miles an hour before I felt it now on the truck camper it's super easy to drive the thing I had to get used to the first day was that you could see the overhang a little bit it's like wearing a baseball cap and it like messed with my peripheral vision in the beginning but now it's like nothing the only thing I worry about with the truck camper is the height now of course your camping options vary when I went from my smaller rigs to my fifth wheel the most common question I got was is it hard to find camping it's not as easy if you want to stay in an RV park or a national forest campground or a state park or you just need a last-minute reservation length really is important a lot of campgrounds don't allow rigs over 25 feet and most RV parks are booked up sooner with the big spaces and especially the drive-thru spaces I absolutely had less options in the fifth wheel for camping than I did in my other rigs but for me I normally boondock so it's really easy for me to get the fifth wheel out into some big wide open space it's no problem at all and once I get out there if I'm going to be boondocking for a couple of weeks it's nice to have all the living space so that gets me into the last part of this video where I'm going to talk to you about things you might want to consider that you may never have thought of before when you're choosing a rig these are all things that I've learned along the way and I hope that it's helpful the first thing is heating costs it is expensive to heat a bigger rig like this one if you watched the budget video last week the propane cost for this rig can be triple what it was in my smaller rigs especially when I was camping in the winter the next thing is if you have a pet when I first started on the road you guys know I have my cat big boy he just stayed in the b-plus and he just stayed in the sea the biggest problem in those two rigs was where to put the litter box I put it in the passenger wheel well when I switched to a tall stand-up box most people I know put it in the shower but that means every time you take a shower you have to take out the litter box which is a pain in the pitook now with the fifth wheel I couldn't leave the cat back in the camper while I was driving so I'd have to take him from the fifth wheel into the cab of the truck and then take him back when I got to my location with the truck camper thanks to somebody on youtube I figured out how to make a phone pass through between the back window of my truck and the window in my truck camper so I keep the litter box in the front passenger wheel well of my truck and the cat can go back and forth as much as he wants the next thing to consider especially if you're a boondocker is solar space when I first started out on the road you might remember that I did a video called the ABCs of power which was always be charging that's because on my first two rigs I could only fit you know one or two little solar panels on the roof and I had to be really frugal with my power usage and when I have my inverter on and every light had to be off and the water heater always had to be off and then I still had to have a little power station and all kinds of little rechargeable devices that I charged during the day the good thing about going to a bigger rig like in the fifth wheel is that you have a ton of roof space in my fifth wheel I think I have 1200 watts of storage I've got six lithium batteries and a 3000 watt inverter and honestly I never turn the water pump off I never turn the inverter off it's a game changer it's like living in a tiny house the next thing to consider is what I call the hassle factor now it's true in a camper van or a little class C you can jump right up into the driver's seat and just go you might have to put in a slide you might have to put up some stabilizing legs if you have them but it's a lot easier now with the fifth wheel it's a completely different story I'm going to keep it real breaking down and setting up camp in the fifth wheel is a much bigger hassle than it was in my first two vehicles there's three slides you have to bring in and you have to take care of those slides and you have to clean off the top of the slides and then there's the legs which you have to take care of and you have to hook it up to the truck and unhook it from the truck and raise it and lower it and it is a hassle now you get more living space for that but there's a lot to learn now there are a lot of great resources out there so I won't get too much into it but with the truck camper you have to learn how to load it unload it tie it down and make sure that you get the right truck camper for your truck the next thing to consider is your propane fill I never thought about it in my first two rigs because in my B plus and in my C the propane fill was just on the side of the rig so I would go to a propane place and the guy would come out and fill it up like a gas tank with the fifth wheel I could not just pull up at a propane place I had to take out two really big canisters and have them filled and then put them back in which are very heavy I could do it on the fifth wheel on the truck camper I have two big propane tanks that I have to put up into my truck camper on a slide and honestly I can't do it I can't do it when they're full and I hate asking people for help it is the thing that I hate most about my truck camper normally what I've done is when I get to the propane place I tell the guy look I can get these tanks out but I can't get them back in would you mind helping me I'm happy to tip you the next thing you want to consider is if you're camping in the winter or you think you're going to be camping in bad weather every year I try and spend the holidays near my family so I'm usually in Colorado for about six weeks and a winter camp you need a hookup and so I would take my leisure travel van or my tiffin to a state park or an RV park but here's what you want to consider you can feel really cooped up if you have a small rig and you're stuck inside for weeks the fifth wheel is a dream to camp in in the winter I mean look at some of these pictures it's like you're inside it's cozy there's a little fireplace you can kick back the cat loves that he sits in the windows and you have this amazing view and honestly I haven't camped in the truck camper in the snow I don't think I'd like it because there is not even a space in the truck camper to lounge and you know that's another thing to think about the truck camper I use the dinette as a desk and then all my lounging if I'm inside is done up in the bed and you don't have the big windows in the truck camper you don't have a view the next thing to consider is your lifestyle I mean are you gonna go go go if you want to go across the country and see the national parks or you know go to minor league baseball games or museums or whatever a camper van or a small class c would be great because it's easy to get to those places and the gas mileage is better but if you have a lot of toys or a boat or you just want to bring a lot of stuff with you you might need a bigger rig and if you want a stealth camp like you can see I did here my leisure travel van in the city you probably want a rig that looks less like an RV than a fifth wheel does another thing to consider is mobility I know people that got fifth wheels and then didn't like them just because of the two little steps they go up to the bedroom going up and down those steps and going down the front steps in a fifth wheel is kind of a big deal if you've got bad knees or a bad hip I actually know somebody that fell off the stairs of their fifth wheel and broke their hip a truck camper would not be good for somebody who has trouble getting in and out of the bed you might want to get a class c where you can climb right up into the driver's seat and then go directly back into the camper another big thing to consider is space for your laundry and your trash when you live in a small rig like a b or a b plus or a c most of those rigs do not have a pull out for a trash can or space for a laundry hamper for me my trash in my laundry was in the shower which meant that I had to take it out and put it back in every time I wanted to take a shower in the fifth wheel I have room for a laundry hamper and I actually have a pullout drawer that has two trash cans in it so that's a bonus for a bigger rig you also want to consider that the more components you have in your RV the more there is to repair so if you just have a b camper van no big deal something breaks just swap it out you keep going and the fifth wheel there's a lot more to break you're going down bumpy roads a lot of the connections are plastic you know you always have to tighten the screws in your cabinets the awning can break the slides can break the seals can break now this can happen in all rigs but there's just more of it in a rig like a fifth wheel that you have to consider and finally another big thing to consider is that if you have an all-in-one like a class b or class c or class a if you're a full timer when you have to do a repair you might have to go off the road for that that's why I switched to a fifth wheel and then a truck camper because if I have to have major repairs done it's okay I still have a truck where I can go and camp more stay in a hotel or go visit someone that's it you guys I know this one was a whopper but I hope it gave you some things to consider when you're looking for your next RV if you have any questions or comments or you have an experience that you think people can learn from please do put it down in the comments below I'll see you guys next week until then everybody have happy travels and be free


Maddie G, how are you doing? Hello, hello. Hope all is well. I'm doing good. I got some, check this out. I got some local organic blueberries and strawberries. Really good. Really, really good. We've eaten so many strawberries this year. Like crazy, crazy amount of strawberries. Like really delicious strawberries as well. Like super good, super good. Organically grown local farm, we pick it up. So good. So good. And the blueberries, fantastic as well. That's where we're gonna get them zoomed in. Focus. Will it focus, will it focus? I don't know, oh, there it is. Blueberries. So good, so good. I also got this morning, I took some sunflower seeds. Sunflower, sunflower seeds, right? Heated them up, okay. And you can see it's a little hard here.  So what you get, this is like a chunk of chocolate in there. Can you see the chunk of chocolate? Ooh, see the chunk of chocolate? So salted sunflower seeds with chocolate, pan, pan, heated, roasted, and it was really good. You gotta have your snacks, man. You gotta have your snacks.


This is Witchbase news for Friday the 2nd of April 2021, I'm CMDR Buur. In this weeks news, we've some useful tips and nuggets from the Odyssey Alpha, there's a new Odyssey video coming from Frontier, FDev responds regarding Apex shuttles and hordes of murder bots, there's more pre-engineered in-game rewards for this week's community goals, a Netflix documentary features CMDR Michael Holyland and more. If you enjoy this video hit like and subscribe and remember to click the little bell icon and select all notifications as that stuff really helps the channel and if you'd like to further support our work you'll also find us on Patreon, links to everything you need are in the description below. In our various travels through Odyssey and dealings with Frontier we've picked up numerous interesting and useful nuggets of information that have value but don't really fit in a dedicated video of their own so we thought we'd impart them in a nice efficient data package here, so here we go then. It's expected that Phase 2 of the Alpha will start on Wednesday next week the 7th of April and it will shift the focus of testing to feature the Frontline Solutions Surface Combat Zone system. You can deploy to surface based combat zones in Odyssey from a Frontline Solutions NPC piloted dropship using some sort of new dropship deployment method. When you respawn you'll appear in the dropship again ready for deployment. The combat zones are 12 v12 capture point based wars of attrition. Because of the way the backpack and consumable system works it appears that your ships in Elite Dangerous Odyssey may well have a storage capacity system similar in part at least to that of the fleet carrier. Currently in the Odyssey Apex shuttles you can move items between storage in the ship and your commander's backpack inventory. There are 9 new Odyssey specific engineers and engineering bases will have social spaces that rhymes. There's a mercenary elite rank as well as the new exobiologist elite rank. Existing elite ranks are getting an extra prestige tier added to them. The maverick mercenary suit comes in 3 flavours bronze, silver and gold. Extra tiers can be unlocked somehow. If you wander far enough away from a settlement the apex shuttles will pick you up in the wilderness away from the gunfire rather than on the landing pad. Around 500 to 700 meters appears to be the sweet spot but further testing is required. You can manage your suit loadouts at any terminal in a station or starport but you can only change the loadout you have on a ship or SRV. Arthur said on stream this week that he would like to see emotes in the game. Apex shuttles can't be interdicted. The Apex adders feature 6 seats inside them and Arthur has said on stream that multiple commanders in a shuttle is likely on the way. We find it curious that shuttles had 6 seats in them but that to the best of our knowledge at least currently teams like wings are only 4 players max and combat zones battles of 12v12. Dare we dream that team sizes at the very least are being increased and that will be able to carry more than 3 people in something the size of an anaconda time will tell. Ship models in odyssey appear to have been upgraded and improved at the very least. Wings are now called teams and the team beacon is on by default. Ships now feature flashing beacon and appropriate red and green navigation lights. The current alpha planetary surface details like mountains and canyons are not final. The galaxy map bookmark system has had a serious makeover and has had significant functionality added to it. The developers are interested in looking at proximity based voice chat for odyssey in the future. There are 15 new genus types of biological life coming each has multiple subspecies associated with it they are placed by appropriate planetary conditions and some are locked to specific galactic regions. You will be able to buy pre-engineered or modified weapons these are rare however. None of the mods to a weapons stats are RNG based in theory you can bypass any engineering path by finding one of these weapons for sale. The rumours section of the codex will still be present but it's expected that it will be used as a fallback position and likely won't be needed due to improvements in the exploration and discovery system. So that's what we've managed to garner in the last few weeks if you have any tips tricks or pieces of useful information to share be sure to drop them in the comments below. Elsewhere in odyssey news this week Arthur mentioned on the Thursday live stream that a new video asset was in the works at frontier detailing the front line solutions combat zone system which as we've just mentioned is one of the focuses of phase 2 of the alpha which is expected to start next week and frontier responded in a forum post this week to the ongoing feedback regarding the odyssey alpha in particular they focused on the much mentioned super cruise travel times for the current system we're locked into and the murder bot nature of the NPCs present at some installations and how it often doesn't tally to the threat level indicator of the mission. In the issue of super cruise travel times they pointed out that the system conditions we are currently locked to will be exacerbating the issue and that in the full game it won't be nearly so much of an issue at all but they are also looking at possibly addressing the default starter station position to be deeper into the system which will reduce the travel time to the vast majority of planets. They've also stated that a planned feature going forward is to have the distance to target displayed on the mission briefing meaning players themselves can easier filter the missions that they choose to take and on the subject of the hordes of NPC murder bots the issue of how and why threat levels for missions are being incorrectly handled is being investigated and changes are expected in a future update. A new video game based documentary launched onto Netflix this week and as part of its roundup of video game culture stories it featured Commander Michael Holyland who discovered Elite Dangerous while fighting leukemia in hospital. The 15 year old commander lost his battle in May of 2019 but not before rising to prominence within the Elite community. Michael's story and what happened in his final hours is nothing short of extraordinary. The documentary features interviews with current and former Frontier staffers as well as Michael's loved ones. The documentary called Not a Game is a fascinating watch overall and shows Frontier and the community as a whole at their very best in the very worst of circumstances. This week saw two new community goals go live pitching Imperial forces against the Neo-Marlinists. Both sides of the conflict are represented with separate community goals and both goals feature a pre-engineered module as a potential reward for participation. The Imperials are offering a fully engineered Class 2B long range and high capacity railgun with feedback cascade whilst the Neo-Marlinists would buy your service with a uniquely augmented Class 2B enzyme missile rack with increased caustic damage and capacity. To be in with a chance of earning the reward you'll need to be in the top 10% of commanders and if the community goal wins overall then the top 75% of commanders will also receive the appropriate module. Check the in-game Galnet newsfeed to learn more about the goals themselves and they'll finish on Thursday the 8th of April. And a couple of short and finally stories this week. City manager Arthur Tolmy hinted on Twitter today that there is something coming in April with regard to in-game events. We don't know any more than that but this stuff is always fun, if and when we find out more we'll let you know here so do be sure to watch out for that. And Reddit user BacteriaFage posted this incredible diorama featuring a 3D printed Corvette and modelled Planetscape with settlement buildings and vehicles. Just beautiful, luckily we're not the jealous types. So how is your elite going right now, are you excited for Odyssey yet or do you still need to see more detail? What are you focusing on in the main game and are you keen to see what Arthur has up his sleeves? Let us know in the comments below. That's it for now, thanks very much for watching, we'll be back later this week with more videos until then, O7 commanders follow the Greens on the way out and do keep clear of the toast rack, we very much look forward to seeing you next time.