I would be more then happy to pay a reasonable amount for proper customer service and support of the mission planner and APM software.
I realize that you guys are all doing this out of the goodness of your heart. But myself and I am sure many other busy people would like if there was a better way to solve problems then posting it on 15 forums and hoping that one of you will see it and have time to answer (again please dont take this as an attack on the current level of service, I realize that it is all being done for free apart from the 3DR people).
I would really like to stick with the open source platform here mostly because of the ability to inspect logs, and adjust anything I want, but I am really upset that there isn’t really a formal support system.
I hope no one takes this as an attack, just as what it is a friendly thought.
Interesting post. I wonder if there is enough demand in the market to make this work. Arducopter is at the point now, where people will be using it for professional applications. But time is money, and as you indicate, there is probably going to be some demand for a higher level of service.
I wonder if a Kickstarter campaign could make this a workable situation?
I was thinking just a private pay forum where there is a dedicated staff to answer questions? Promise an X hour response time including follow up until an issue can be resolved? Maybe this forum would have an improvements section where improvements suggested there get moved up the list? (Get RSSI working on pixhawk
Stefan, can you please explain what you were saying? You will shortly have a ticketing system? Or there has been one for a little bit? If so how does one access it?
Sorry, I totally missed that. We do have an internal ticket system for the admins/mods but that’s misbehaving at the moment. One of my construction sites. I’ll point Vu to this thread - he’s probably the right guy to comment.
I know you guys are probably all pretty busy right now, but maybe each of you (3dr staff engineers) could dedicate 30 mintues to an hour per day to answering questions here, and addressing issues on some other forums as well, after all the more info there is out there right now the easier it is for people to start using pixhawk.
I also think you should start an Austin branch and hire me to run it, I am a mechanical engineer with management an drone experience
Ken, we know you. You are notorious .
Anyways, if you check the 3DR support group, you will find that especially RogelioN is spending more than just half an hour per (business-) day in here and 3DR recently upped their support staff. All those guys in the support group are dedicated support engineers who spend as much time in the forums as their other work (phone tickets, email tickets, etc.) allow!
Maybe instead of doing help requests via email they do them via the forums? Or they have a section where they post problems and resolutions on the forums? It is good that they are helping people, but I bet they are learning things that aren’t getting shared.
As Vu wrote, a concept is under way. The thing is that this forum and the tech support developed independent of each other and then it was decided to have hardware support here too, but still keep the direct support, because many people like a personal phone call or use email. Plus commercial users might not want to reveal logfiles in a public forum - just as an example.
It’s not easy to merge 2 existing independent systems into one single system that makes sense.
