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by aprentic 84 days ago
And he's just making a grill scrubber.

I just ordered a bunch of drone parts. The majority of those part were only available from China.

1 comments

If you want: motors, ESCs, flight controllers and radios those can be sourced from outside of China, and competitively priced too (if you're in Europe, outside you'd still have to add taxes).
Yeah tbf I wouldn't underestimate Eastern Europe. The drone industry there must be booming nowadays, pun not intended.
How?

As near as I can tell, the vast majority of the parts are made in China. When I look at the few alternatives, they're full of Chinese circuitry. If I look at circuit components, they're all made of Chinese raw materials.

Both Ukraine and Russia are planning to deploy (and use up) several million drones over the next year. Iran just joined them as a major procurer.

Where are all the US and EU component factories?

In Spain, the Netherlands and Ukraine.
Do you have any links?
Already in that other comment.
It's everywhere. And 'China free' is a real motto here.
I can't install a motto in my drone. None of the alternatives will allow me to put a physical drone part in my hand with any degree of reliability.
The thread is about manufacturing in the US so tariffs do have to be factored in.

On those specific parts:

Motors: T-Motor F90 1300KV - $119.60(incl shipping) + Tariff

ESC: Holybro Tekko32 F4 50A - $88.97(incl shipping) + Tariff

FC: Matek H743-SLIM V4 - £88.12(incl shipping + VAT) + Tariff

Radio: Radiomaster M2 $95.99(incl shipping + sales tax)

The FC was from a UK store but it originated in China. I already had the radio so I don't have current prices on it.

I'd love to find a list of vendors that have comparable parts, in stock, and without being insane multiples of those prices.

edit: formatting

Motor-g doesn't seem to ship outside of Ukraine. That's totally understandable but for anyone outside of Ukraine, they effectively don't exist.

Arctus asks you to contact them just for product info. It seems they just raised 2.6M in seed funding 3 months ago. It's great that there are startups in NL but that's not even close to a replacement for China's scale yet.

Both of these may change the landscape in the future. For now, neither of them is a practical way to get drone parts without China.

> Motor-g doesn't seem to ship outside of Ukraine.

They absolutely do.

> Arctus asks you to contact them just for product info.

You can order as much as you want from them, the price is right and the quality is extremely high.

Indeed, they're not on AliExpress, but that's roughly the difference between being a producer in Europe and in China, and that is precisely the difference that you should be happy with.

Can you show me? Is this some privileged access that you get as an investor?

Its easy to verify that Motor-g does not ship outside of Ukraine. I just put 4 of their motors in a shopping cart and tried to check out. The drop down menu for destination country has a single option, Ukraine.

Arctus does not list a single price on their website. That's also easy to verify. Every single product on their website only says, "request product data", or "coming soon".

eumotors.eu