Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

Truly Wireless, Fieldwire, and Boxbee look pretty interesting. Boxbee's name might be slightly confusing (Boxee is a video appliance), but they're in pretty separate fields.

I'm kind of confused why DroneDeploy is specifically non-military; it seems like there is just as much ITAR compliance either way, and even if they don't market to military, I don't see much difference between selling to the Army Corps of Engineers for a civil engineering project in the Gulf/Mississippi/etc. vs. selling to an NGO operating in a warzone.

View on HN

Why do you say they are specifically non-military?

I work at a company that deals with ITAR (albeit I'm an engineer and hence with limited knowledge about these regulations). We deal with this kind of technology and only a small part of it needs to be ITAR compliant, if at all. If you are working specifically for the military as a (sub)contractor, ITAR restrictions could become more important.

The main part of a drone that I think could run the risk for being controlled is a high-precision IMU. I doubt any other stuff would need to be under ITAR. And if the application is not military, you could probably get by with an off-the-shelf IMU.

All the press about them leads off with "non-military".

Friendly Wikipedia look-ups for those Not In The Know:

* ITAR is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations)

* IMU is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_measurement_unit

At least I had to look these up.

I can't find anything stating one way or the other but potentially it's a moral issue? The reason drones have received bad press is because they're being used for extremely dubious purposes. I can totally understand if they'd want to distance themselves from that. It would be great to see a company who could easily branch out into military applications putting ethics before profit.

I had assumed that they were emphasising "non-military" to avoid association with the bad press armed "drones" have been getting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com