"We all love PuppyCopter but we don't know what to do with it"

- Greg Gopman, AngelHack Co-Founder, awarding Honorable Mention to PuppyCopter

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

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:

• 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

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

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.