 And we have the ID Tech X show right here. And hi. Hi, I'm Thomas with 219 Design. We're showing off the drone that we designed with DuPont to showcase a ton of their different materials and technologies. For example, we've got a lightweight nylon frame. We've got a conductive printed ink for the circuitry of the LEDs and the antenna. We've also got these high current flexes that can draw 40 amps of current. So we work with DuPont to do this formed electronics right here. What is the advantage? Right. So the advantage here is that we've got lightweight circuitry, which helps increase flight time. It's also a process that's easy to prototype. It's a screen printed ink and then a vacuum form. It's definitely lighter than the conventional way of doing. Right. Then like a wiring harness. Yeah, it saves a little bit of weight. And every bit you save is just increased flight time. So instead of hitting cable, you have it on the case. Right, yeah. So you can see it's just printed on a sheet of plastic, on a flat sheet. And then it's formed into the shape. Then we can paint the back and you end up with a pretty cool design in addition to just the lightweight cool circuitry. So what signals goes through the lines right here? So right here we have an RF antenna that controls the drone. And then this array is just a set of LEDs. I can flip it around. You can see on the other side, they're just epoxy to the plastic. So we don't have a battery in here now. But when it's in flight, you can see where the drone is. What about these nice shapes and everything? Is that part of your design skills to do something that looks like that? It is. We wanted it to look cool. And so we did these cool shapes. This is the high current flex that's in there. It's a copper flex. High current. Yeah, so these can draw 40 amps of current. It's flexible material? Yeah, this is all flexible. It's very light. It's like a cable? Or what does it do? Right, so the motors themselves are soldered to the flexes. Can you show? Yeah, right here you can see that. And it comes around to where it goes to the battery. So there's power. There's electronics. There's signals and stuff going through. There's no communication in these, but the flexes are capable of doing that. There's just on-off power, no power. Right, it is power, yeah. If it powers more or less, that makes it turn faster or slower. Right, right. You've been building drones for a long time, or? Yeah, we've designed a couple of different drones. But yeah, 219 Design is an engineering consultancy. So we do a variety of different things. Everything from medical to consumer products, industrial products, a lot of software development, pretty much anything to get a product to market. So you're kind of showing off your skills with this project, right? Right, yeah. This was a fun project where we got to design a drone from ground up. And it's on display at Dupont's Silicon Valley Research Center. It looks like little elephant horns. Right, so these are 3D printed feet. So these are flexible feet. It's really durable material. These are all Dupont materials. But these were, we were able to print on an FDM printer in our studio. It allows a nice flexible landing gear for the drone, which is pretty cool. It might get stuck on grass or something, though. Well, it could, yeah. It's got the power to pull out of the grass, so that's cool. And how about this plastic kind of thing? Is this 3D printed or not? No, this is an injection molded frame, a nylon frame. So this was also something that was part of this project was having 3D printed pieces, injection molded pieces, vacuum form, a lot of different manufacturing processes and materials technologies in this guy. So Dupont has a cool lab. Oh, it was called Showcase. Yeah. It's actually the innovation center in Silicon Valley. It's just a place to show off all the cool stuff, right? Right, right. So yeah, yeah. They have a lobby with a lot of amazing, amazing things, and the drone is one of them. Is there any chance that drones like this would be mass produced more easily? More durable? Right. Cheaper, lighter? Yeah. So one thing we're hoping for is that companies will pick up on some of these materials in this drone. And use them in more mass manufactured designs. This one really is just a Showpiece. So it's really a prototype. But yeah. You could literally print out the drones. Right, yeah. You can print a lot of the parts. I mean, these are 3D printed feet. They're very durable. You could print the frame. This is injection molded. So it's more of a high volume process. But at lower volumes, it would make sense to 3D print it. Is there a chance this might be the cheapest way to make a drone? Yeah, we didn't cost optimize this design. But somebody could if they were doing a manufactured drone. You could cost optimize for sure. How reliable does it get, all these form kind of lines up here? Right, the printed ink. I can't really speak to the reliability. But hopefully it has to be reliable like a cable, right? It should just last forever. It should be. That should be the requirement. In the production part, yeah. We didn't do any of the testing or anything else for this one, it being a prototype. And it flies? It does, yeah, it flies. It's got some pretty healthy motors in it. It's pretty fast drone. So it flies pretty good? It does, yeah. We have a video on DuPont's website and on our website of the drone flying. I'll link the video to that so people can check it out. Description. There's a battery warmer using Kapton. Why do you need to warm the battery? So in cold weather, lithium batteries perform better if they're warmed up. And so performance in cold weather is a reason for heating the battery. And that uses a DuPont Kapton RS. And flex circuits for motor power. And designing gear. Yeah, the parallax flex circuits are the high current flexes that we used all DuPont. 21Design is just a partner of DuPont. It's not part of DuPont, right? No, we're not part of DuPont. We work with DuPont on a variety of projects. But DuPont hired us to develop the drone concept. Can you list some of the, like you said, some of the other things, 219Design has done, some awesome other things, right? Yeah, we've done a lot of work in surgical robotics. We've done some industrial products, a lot of software, a lot of firmware, mechanical and electrical design. Based where? We're based in Mountain View, but we also have an office in San Francisco. We're in North Carolina in Raleigh as well. So it's a very Silicon Valley kind of company, right? Definitely, definitely. Yeah, we're involved in a lot of new technologies and a lot of different markets and industries. And do your design gets mass produced in huge quantities? Sometimes. Oh, yeah, yeah. For like prototype, amazing prototypes. We do it all. So we do some prototypes. We do quite a bit of proof of concept prototypes for different clients. For some of our bigger clients, we're doing mass manufactured products. We've got products that are available at stores like Best Buy and Walgreens. So you have a range of famous products that we might not be able to say which ones. Right, yeah. So if I look at something like a, I'm not gonna, I'm afraid to say it, but I'll just say it, you don't react, okay? But like something like a Google Home or something. It might be some kind of partnership like that that creates new kind of cool looking things. Right, we've been involved in a lot of different projects, something that we can't mention. You can see a lot of them on our website. But yeah, I probably shouldn't name anything specific. Nice. And been doing this for a long time? We've been in business 15 years. We're 25 engineers across the three offices. So this IDTech show is a lot to do with printer electronics and all this stuff. Are you excited about the opportunities of using this stuff to do new things? Absolutely, yeah. It's amazing technologies and it's great to see it coming out in production products. So it gives, it's like a dream kind of thing for industrial designers to use these new materials, these new things. Using something like this, an industrial designer must be like, what do you call it, in heaven? Yeah, definitely. Or something like thinking, oh my God, what should I do now? Right, I mean the amazing thing is it just opens up so many opportunities to play with form and that you couldn't do before, that you were limited by the technology. And so having this, you can do just a lot more different shapes, just better designs in the end. There are cables, but there are not as many as there used to be. Right, there are some. Yeah, we had to, there were some we couldn't get away from or some that were just cost prohibitive to really go further than this. Maybe eventually there could be no cables. Right, yeah. Eventually it could be. You'd have just connectors and flexes and printed electronics. How far is this world where everything just looks like that? Oh, I don't know. I mean, we could do it now, but it's just, yeah, getting the right application, getting the right. You just code your neighbor as one of these companies. Right. Just, hey, what about, how many million, you don't need that many millions. I'm joking. Yeah, I mean, it would depend on the right application. It has to make sense. But we're starting to see more and more of that coming out in real products and not just in prototypes and demos, but in real things that are out on the shelf. I think just a cool look is one huge selling point. Definitely, yeah. It's not just about potentially being more efficient, more cheaper or lighter and everything, but it's also looking futuristic. Yeah, it's the opportunity, it opens up a lot of opportunities. So it really removes the constraints of standard known manufacturing processes and lets you do more with the technology. Just to end out with you, I hope it's not too weird or something, but Trump is talking about the wall, you know? And I've always thought that there should be a bunch of drones instead. And they should have battery swapping. But I'm thinking the next step, they should just print themselves new drones. You can just have like drone pictures on the border and they're just like the drones come out of the printer and they just go fly over and they swap the battery and stuff. That's a concept, yeah. Okay, that's weird.