We wanted to take some time to discuss the changes that have been happening, both ones you see and don't see, plus the reasons behind this as we are aware this change was not previously announced, so let's get in to it!
The original Drone-Hacks client was born out of a frustration with existing offerings on the market, it was felt that there had been some stagnation in the development of new hacks and the only offering at the time was letting customers down. It was felt that there was space for a new player and so Drone-Hacks was launched by Andreas Makris aka Bin4ry in June 2020.
Hacking drones used to be "easy" however as DJI began to notice what was happening, they massively stepped up security, adding more encryption, trust zones and many more techniques to thwart modification attempts. This required more and more skills and significantly more time to be able to develop hacks.
As time goes on it is natural that life goals and priorities change and Andreas and his team wished to focus their attention on other projects away from the drone hacking scene, he 'retired' from public view in mid 2022. As thinkAwesome GmbH (the company that owned Drone-Hacks) changed their focus, it was decided in late 2023 that Drone-Hacks would benefit from a new owner to continue the great work that has been done rather than letting the project die.
This is where FlyLusive came onboard. Our team is comprised of many known names in the drone hacking scene and we are well equipped to move the Drone-Hacks project forward. As such, Drone-Hacks was acquired by FlyLusive and set up as a new company, DroneWizard. The official handover happened on June 10th 2024 after many months of behind the scenes work.
As mentioned, we are now a mixture of some old and some new names. Our support team has the same faces that you have spoken to since 2020, Cs2000 and Quad808. The company is headed up by Pat from FlyLusive & we have several more names behind the scenes who may or may not become public as time moves on.
The immediate plan is to ensure full functionality of Drone-Hacks. As it stands, the website is functional, but has several dead links and needs some features re-adding. The Drone-Hacks client and license purchases are functional. Any known bugs on the client and website are the number one priority to be fixed.
Update 14/06/24 - Website dead links are now all resolved
You MUST be using the latest Drone-Hacks client, available from the front page of our website. Older versions will no longer work as they are not designed to work with our infrastructure.
Moving on from this, we will be looking at re-adding any missing features from the original website such as the blog and a proper support portal, along with any necessary articles and ancillary downloads that used to be available on the old site.
Update 12/06/24 - This wiki replaces the old blog, important articles such as the M3 downgrade tutorial are re-added and all ancillary downloads are now available again.
Later down the line we do have major plans for the Drone-Hacks client itself, both in terms of looks, features and of course support for more drones & firmware, but we will discuss those in more detail once the time is right.
Right now, the most important thing for you to do is to create an account on the new website. Once you are logged in, you will see a message telling you to migrate your licenses from the old Drone-Hacks system. Please follow this process to ensure that your licenses are available in our systems. We would have loved to transfer the customer data so that you didn't have to do this, but due to many boring complex legal issues this wasn't possible.
The migration process will be available up until December 2025 so please ensure you have migrated your licenses before this date otherwise they will be lost.
Our team is hard at work fixing bugs and restoring full functionality, so please bear with us during this time. If you do need help, you can log a support ticket by visiting the main website, scrolling to the bottom and filling out the contact form. Someone will get back to you as soon as possible, but please understand that due to the change there are a large volume of tickets and our usual response times may be slightly longer until everything settles down.
The whole team is so excited to show you what we have coming & we hope you will enjoy what we have to show you. Please be patient whilst we get settled in and can start pushing Drone-Hacks forward and giving it some amazing new features in 2024 and beyond.