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Order your PuppyCopter T-Shirts here! That's right folks - you can now have your very own PuppyCopter t-shirt AND support a good cause at the same time! All t-shirt profits will be donated to the SF SPCA and local shelters - because every animal deserves to be taken care of. PS: We're giving Teespring a shot this time around - let us know what you think of them. |
Friday, May 10, 2013
PuppyCopter T-Shirts!!!
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
"We all love PuppyCopter but we don't know what to do with it"
- Greg Gopman, AngelHack Co-Founder, awarding Honorable Mention to PuppyCopter
The rest of this blog post will be about some of our experiences and lessons learned at AngelHack SF! TL;DR - it was freakin' awesome.
"I love it when a plan comes together"
-Colonel John "Hannibal" Smith, The A-Team
The most important requirement for a plan to come together is actually having a plan.
Team PuppyCopter held two late-evening pizza-fueled ideation sessions in the weeks leading up to AngelHack. We ideated like nobody's business.
We also took care of setting up our organizational infrastructure, setting up our development environments, and figuring out what roles people would play during the hackathon.
We kept the sessions small, but we always made sure we had one non-core friend there to give objective feedback on our ideas and prevent us from getting caught up in the hype.
"Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy"
-Carly Rae Jepsen, Call Me Maybe
Be prepared and open to bringing new talent on-board - you never know who you'll meet at the hackathon!
During the planning sessions, we tried to scope down the hack to something which we could do by ourselves within 24 hours. After all, only losers come to hackathons without their own ideas, right?
WRONG!
There is some pretty ridiculous talent floating around the hackathon looking for teams to join. We were fortunate enough to pick up an awesome full-stack dev, uber hardware hacker, and slick design superstar.
"Omnomnommmmmgrbmphwheeeeee"
-Oskar, AngelHack SF
Nothing will get your hack more street cred than an endorsement from the baby community.
If you see a baby at a hackathon, you need to run - not walk, run - over and get the baby's UI/UX feedback. Noone is going to give you more honest, unbiased, objective feedback on the desirability of your product.
Hypotheses Oskar validated for us include:
"When you're here, you're family"
-The Olive Garden, 1998
Few things in life are more valuable than having a family which will come out and support you no matter what crazy hi-jinks you're pulling off.
This is the PuppyCopter family.
Like any family, we have our ups and downs. Some days we love each other, other days we hate each other. Sometimes we have awkward crushes on each other and wonder if we're distant enough for it to be okay.
But like all families, we know how to come together when it's go time!
"If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"
-Sir Isaac Newton
Now matter how innovative and crazy you think your idea is, someone else has been there and done that.
In our case, we had the privilege of meeting some of the founders of Darwin Aerospace - the geniuses behind the aerial food delivery system Burrito Bomber!
Rumor has it, they got their start at AngelHack San Jose 2012!
They were nice enough to swing by AngelHack SF, check out our little operation, and offer some tips about our hardware and systems setup. Turns out we're both using the same flight controller / stabilization / autopilot system, even though our flying platforms are totally different.
"Safety. Safety first, then teamwork"
-Saul, Pineapple Express
8000 RPM of 13" fiberglass composite spinning death kind of serious.
Some of the safety precautions we took included enforcing flight area perimeters for all test flights and handing out protective glasses to judges during the final round demo.
One of the most insightful questions we received during the final round Q&A was from Josh Constine: "What happens when the first PuppyCopter crashes into the ground and the puppy dies?"
It's not something we like to think about, but it is exactly the sort of question we need to be prepared for. The automotive and aircraft industries have developed a formal process of capturing, diagnosing, and understanding system failures and engineering around them.
As we grow PuppyCopter and prepare our technology for mass deployment, we pledge to follow the same processes and hold ourselves to the same standards for design and review as other safety-critical industrial manufacturers such as Boeing.
 |
PuppyCopter made its public debut at AngelHack SF on Cinco de Mayo, 2013! We were up against 500 hackers, 80 teams, and 24 intense hours of non-stop innovation It was a pretty sweet event - we were honored to be one of the top-10 teams invited to present on-stage in the final round and absolutely flattered to be recognized by an honorable mention. |
The rest of this blog post will be about some of our experiences and lessons learned at AngelHack SF! TL;DR - it was freakin' awesome.
"I love it when a plan comes together"
-Colonel John "Hannibal" Smith, The A-Team
Team PuppyCopter held two late-evening pizza-fueled ideation sessions in the weeks leading up to AngelHack. We ideated like nobody's business.
We also took care of setting up our organizational infrastructure, setting up our development environments, and figuring out what roles people would play during the hackathon.
We kept the sessions small, but we always made sure we had one non-core friend there to give objective feedback on our ideas and prevent us from getting caught up in the hype.
"Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy"
-Carly Rae Jepsen, Call Me Maybe
During the planning sessions, we tried to scope down the hack to something which we could do by ourselves within 24 hours. After all, only losers come to hackathons without their own ideas, right?
WRONG!
There is some pretty ridiculous talent floating around the hackathon looking for teams to join. We were fortunate enough to pick up an awesome full-stack dev, uber hardware hacker, and slick design superstar.
"Omnomnommmmmgrbmphwheeeeee"
-Oskar, AngelHack SF
If you see a baby at a hackathon, you need to run - not walk, run - over and get the baby's UI/UX feedback. Noone is going to give you more honest, unbiased, objective feedback on the desirability of your product.
Hypotheses Oskar validated for us include:
- Quadcopters are totally awesome and fun to play with
- Propellers are delicious
- Puppies make everyone smile
"When you're here, you're family"
-The Olive Garden, 1998
This is the PuppyCopter family.
Like any family, we have our ups and downs. Some days we love each other, other days we hate each other. Sometimes we have awkward crushes on each other and wonder if we're distant enough for it to be okay.
But like all families, we know how to come together when it's go time!
"If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"
-Sir Isaac Newton
In our case, we had the privilege of meeting some of the founders of Darwin Aerospace - the geniuses behind the aerial food delivery system Burrito Bomber!
Rumor has it, they got their start at AngelHack San Jose 2012!
They were nice enough to swing by AngelHack SF, check out our little operation, and offer some tips about our hardware and systems setup. Turns out we're both using the same flight controller / stabilization / autopilot system, even though our flying platforms are totally different.
"Safety. Safety first, then teamwork"
-Saul, Pineapple Express
PuppyCopter is serious business.
8000 RPM of 13" fiberglass composite spinning death kind of serious.
Some of the safety precautions we took included enforcing flight area perimeters for all test flights and handing out protective glasses to judges during the final round demo.
One of the most insightful questions we received during the final round Q&A was from Josh Constine: "What happens when the first PuppyCopter crashes into the ground and the puppy dies?"
It's not something we like to think about, but it is exactly the sort of question we need to be prepared for. The automotive and aircraft industries have developed a formal process of capturing, diagnosing, and understanding system failures and engineering around them.
As we grow PuppyCopter and prepare our technology for mass deployment, we pledge to follow the same processes and hold ourselves to the same standards for design and review as other safety-critical industrial manufacturers such as Boeing.
Sunday, May 5, 2013
PuppyCopter Pre-pre-pre-launch
So a bunch of us crazy hardware and software hackers got together one day and decided we were going to do a startup. And that startup would be called PuppyCopter.
Before we ever wrote our first line of real application code, there was a lot of pre-pre-pre-launch items we had to take care of to bootstrap the organization itself. The following is a list of services and tools we used to get off the ground, as well as some very personal, very biased observations about our experiences with them:
Searching for a t-shirt printing shop online was painful until I learned a couple rules:
Surprisingly, stickers are one of those things that have lead-times comparable or worse than t-shirts. I don't know why, and I honestly don't care why. Also, surprisingly few print shops have online design widgets - many of them ask for a "print-ready image". Despite the best efforts of a rather unhelpful employee at a local printshop to educate me on what makes an image "print ready", I decided that once again that I have better things to do with my life than mess around with CMYK settings in Photoshop. So I scoured the internet until I stumbled upon StickersBanners which hit the magic trifecta of having cheap prices, incredibly fast turnaround, and an online designer that took any 'ol image file I gave it and let me tweak it.
Better snatch up those corporate pages and handles before someone else does.
It's 2013. If you don't have a Hadoop set up, you're not WebScale. And if you're not WebScale, you're not even close to being PuppyScale.
Before we ever wrote our first line of real application code, there was a lot of pre-pre-pre-launch items we had to take care of to bootstrap the organization itself. The following is a list of services and tools we used to get off the ground, as well as some very personal, very biased observations about our experiences with them:
DNS: GoDaddy
Yes, their domain manager tool punches you in the face every time you try to use it, but their prices are decent and I already had an account with them. I guess advertising works?Email, Calendar, Docs, Mailing Lists: Google Apps
As soon as you purchase your domain, get the rest of your infrastructure configured via Google Apps. E-mail, calendar, and docs are all a joy to use. And at $5/per user per month, it's a really good value.Placeholder Page: LaunchRock
So you have the domain but you don't actually know what you want to say about your startup - may as well go with a placeholder. I had a very pleasant experience using LaunchRock for a previous startup in 2011, so we came back to them for PuppyCopter. I don't know what happened in the intervening two years, but this time around it was disappointing - clutzy UI, too many mandatory fields that I don't care about, and most importantly I could not figure out how to make widget embedding work when we transitioned away from LaunchRock as the main landing page to an actual website.Website: Heroku
After being thoroughly disappointed by Google Sites for serving up static pages, I decided to just slap together a silly Python/Flask app mostly serving up a static website - Heroku lets you host it for free at a small scale, and as a extra bonus it was easy to tack on some backend code to support our prototyping and demo efforts later on.Blog: Blogger
After being thoroughly disappointed by Google Sites as a blog platform, we switched over to Blogger. It works and has enough of the basic social media integration that Google Sites lacked.T-Shirts: Rush Order Tees
You can't be a real startup without t-shirts for your team, supporters, investors, and friends. I shopped around a couple local t-shirt design and printing shops in SF, but none of them had less than 2-week turnaround times and in most cases small-run (<50) unit costs were close to $20/t-shirt. Screw that.Searching for a t-shirt printing shop online was painful until I learned a couple rules:
- If they don't have an online design editor, pass - life is too short to screw around in Photoshop
- If I have to interact with a human being or wait for an automated system to e-mail me a pricing quote, pass - I need these t-shirts done NOW. I'm not wasting a day waiting for someone to read some numbers off a spreadsheet.
- If they're not quoting a date when I get the t-shirts delivered to my door, pass - I don't care how long it takes once the design is "approved". I care about when the t-shirts arrive in a box at my home.
Stickers: SickersBanners
Sometimes you want to give your fans a little something-something, but you can't quite afford to shell out $20/each to give them t-shirts. So what do you hand out? Stickers! Stickers are awesome and everyone loves them.Surprisingly, stickers are one of those things that have lead-times comparable or worse than t-shirts. I don't know why, and I honestly don't care why. Also, surprisingly few print shops have online design widgets - many of them ask for a "print-ready image". Despite the best efforts of a rather unhelpful employee at a local printshop to educate me on what makes an image "print ready", I decided that once again that I have better things to do with my life than mess around with CMYK settings in Photoshop. So I scoured the internet until I stumbled upon StickersBanners which hit the magic trifecta of having cheap prices, incredibly fast turnaround, and an online designer that took any 'ol image file I gave it and let me tweak it.
Pizza: Round Table Pizza
Startup planning sessions run on pizza. Unfortunately most pizza in this city is somewhere between disgusting and embarrassing. There is the occasional pizzeria that rises above the pack to achieve mediocrity, and every once in a while it even becomes tolerable. In my humble opinion, Round Table is one of the most consistently tolerable pizza places available for delivery in SF. I miss New Jersey.Better snatch up those corporate pages and handles before someone else does.
Big Data: Hadoop
Tuesday, April 30, 2013
Breakup Buddy
It was the summer of 2010 and you would have thought love was in the air. But it wasn't. I thought I had found the love of my life and well, he didn't. We had a tumultuous breakup with a lot of getting back together, breaking up again and when finally I threw his things in a box and burned it all, I knew it was over.
I never forgot the moment when I dropped the tissues, stopped eating the haagen dazs and finally got out of bed. My friends had tried everything from chocolate to tequila shots but nothing works. Finally, one of them brought over their adopted puppy and it all clicked. Buddy was a tiny little beagle that was sooooo cuuuute! I went running with him in the morning. Snuggled with him at night. I think his actual owner actually got a little jealous of me at times. At least, I was the one to play with him and run around with him but never did any of the hard work.
It was the best summer ever. I had a dog to play with on-demand (you wouldn't want me to start wallowing again would you?) and never had to take care of him. It was the best summer ever! I wish I could return to that... without having to go through a breakup... that's why I was ECSTATIC to help start PuppyCopter!!!!
I never forgot the moment when I dropped the tissues, stopped eating the haagen dazs and finally got out of bed. My friends had tried everything from chocolate to tequila shots but nothing works. Finally, one of them brought over their adopted puppy and it all clicked. Buddy was a tiny little beagle that was sooooo cuuuute! I went running with him in the morning. Snuggled with him at night. I think his actual owner actually got a little jealous of me at times. At least, I was the one to play with him and run around with him but never did any of the hard work.
It was the best summer ever. I had a dog to play with on-demand (you wouldn't want me to start wallowing again would you?) and never had to take care of him. It was the best summer ever! I wish I could return to that... without having to go through a breakup... that's why I was ECSTATIC to help start PuppyCopter!!!!
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