DIY Drones at 80,000 members! Reflections on the evolution of DIY robotics and the next big things

It's customary and traditional that we celebrate the addition of every 1,000 new members here and share the traffic stats. There has been a huge amount of change in the drone market since this started as a hobby scratchpad for me back in 2007. We helped created a whole new industry, but it also moved from DIY to plug-and-play at light speed. The technologies, such as advanced IMUs, optical flow and cameras with computer vision, that we were first hacking together with parts from Sparkfun and Adafruit a few years ago are now standard on consumer drones that you can buy at Wal-Mart. As drones become more sophisticated and autonomous (always the intention of this site), the hobbyists who just wanted to fly cool things shifted to FPV racing (called "drone racing" although by a strict definition they're not drones since their manually piloted).