Ding dong, the drone is dead. Pixy, Snap's petite flying selfie camera, is no more. Technically you can still buy one, but The Wall Street Journal reported this week that the device is done for. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has told employees that the company would soon stop making the $230 gizmo. The little drone had a short life.

It's been less than four months since Snap unveiled a selfie drone called Pixy, but it seems the company is already giving up on the device. CEO Evan Spiegel told employees that Snap is halting further work on Pixy amid a reprioritization of resources, according to The Wall Street Journal. The $250 drone can take off from and land in your hand. It has four preset flight paths and can capture photos and videos that you can transfer to and share on Snapchat. For now, at least, Pixy is still available to buy from Snap's website.

On a Tuesday in mid-March, Jennifer Lepp was precisely 80.41 percent finished writing Bring Your Beach Owl, the latest installment in her series about a detective witch in central Florida, and she was behind schedule. The color-coded, 11-column spreadsheet she keeps open on a second monitor as she writes told her just how far behind: she had three days to write 9,278 words if she was to get the book edited, formatted, promoted, uploaded to Amazon's Kindle platform, and in the hands of eager readers who expected a new novel every nine weeks. Lepp became an author six years ago, after deciding she could no longer stomach having to spout "corporate doublespeak" to employees as companies downsized. She had spent the prior two decades working in management at a series of web hosting companies, where she developed disciplined project management skills that have translated surprisingly well to writing fiction for Amazon's Kindle platform. Like many independent authors, she found in Amazon's self-service publishing arm, Kindle Direct Publishing, an unexpected avenue into a literary career she had once dreamed of and abandoned.

Drones are everywhere these days, filming dramatic reveals and awe-inspiring scenery for social media platforms. The problem is, they're not exactly approachable for beginners who have only ever used a smartphone. Last month, Snap debuted the $230 Pixy drone exactly for those people. It requires very little skill and acts like a personal robot photographer to help you produce nifty aerial shots. You don't need to pilot the Pixy.

I'm old enough (safely in my thirties) to remember a time before we all carried digital cameras with almost unlimited memory. With a roll of film, you had 24 chances to capture a moment. What you had was what you got. As a kid, the only opportunity I had to really perfect my pose was when my mom took me to the mall to get our glamour shots done. I was reminded of this when I showed my coworker my Pixy selfies, cringing, and he remarked that it looked like I was putting out a garage rock album. Punk and grunge pics are ostentatiously unposed and unfiltered, which is exactly how the Pixy rolls.

Update April 28th, 1:09PM ET: Snap has officially revealed the Pixy, and we went hands-on with it. You can read our full article -- with video! Our original article about the FCC documents follows. It appears Snap is working on a drone called Pixy, and the whole thing just leaked with a huge amount of details, including photos and a seemingly unfinished user manual, published by the FCC. It's small: rulers in the photos indicate the drone is roughly 130 millimeters wide and 120 millimeters tall, which translates to approximately 5.1 inches by 4.7 inches.

After years of rumors, Snap has officially revealed its first selfie drone. The pocket-sized device, which is called Pixy, doesn't require a lengthy setup. It doesn't even come with a controller. Instead, you'll be able to choose one of four preset flight paths with the touch of a button. The drone can float, orbit or follow you.

Snap is mostly known for its sticky social network consisting of fleeting messages and legitimately impressive augmented reality filters. But every so often Snap, which calls itself a "camera company," produces new hardware. Things get a little weird. This is one of those times. During its annual Snap Partner Summit today, the company showed off a flying camera, the type of device otherwise known as a drone.

An open-source project aims to give a rudimentary eye to robots with the help of a camera that can detect, identify and track the movement of specific objects. The Pixy camera sensor board, being developed by Charmed Labs and Carnegie Mellon University, can detect objects based on seven colors, and then report them back to a computer. A Kickstarter campaign was launched on Thursday to fund the $25,000 project, and the organizations are on pace to reach full funding by the end of the day. Adding the Pixy could be viewed as giving robots basic vision, said Rich LeGrand, founder of Charmed Labs. "Once you have vision, then you can introduce the idea of tasks," LeGrand said. "If you want a robot to charge itself, that's a simple example of a task.

Pixy is a smart vision sensor you can quickly "teach" to find objects. It saves you time by only outputting the object data you're interested in. A multitude of connection options means you can use Pixy with almost any microcontroller. It connects directly to Arduino with the included cable, and fully supports Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black with included software libraries. Included in the box is mounting hardware to attach Pixy to your robot creation.