Lumipad
Register

Build drones.
Earn a living.

Training drone pilots in Mindanao with drones they built themselves.

Homemade agricultural drone built by Lumipad trainees

We train, they build, everyone shares.

01

We train entrepreneurs to fly.

Rural community members enroll in a six-week program and graduate as certified drone pilots — ready to launch their own microenterprise offering crop-health surveys to nearby farms and cooperatives.

02

They build the drones themselves.

Every aircraft is hand-assembled in our Davao workshop using parts sourced inside the Philippines — locally-cut frames, off-the-shelf components. No proprietary kit, no import dependency.

03

All of it is open.

Plans, parts lists, wiring diagrams, and the full six-week curriculum — everything we develop is published free under Creative Commons, in English, Tagalog and Cebuano.

Lumipad trainee building a drone in the Davao workshop

A program, a kit,
and a business — all in one.

Locals enroll. They learn on simulators and on real airframes. They graduate with a working drone, a service playbook, and ongoing support — ready to charge nearby farms for crop-health surveys.

STEP 01

Enroll

Community members from rural farming barangays sign up for a free, full-cohort training program — no prior electronics background required.

STEP 02

Train

Hands-on workshops with simulators, soldering irons, and full assembly of a working quadcopter — taught with our open documentation library.

STEP 03

Graduate and fly

Every graduate leaves with a fully assembled, calibrated drone and the qualification to operate it for survey work in their region — as well as financial support for drone pilot certification.

STEP 04

Earn

Graduates run their own micro-business: drone surveys, NDVI imagery, plant counts and field reports for nearby growers, agribusinesses and co-ops.

Drone surveying agricultural farmland

We fill a critical gap in
drones for agriculture.

Agricultural drones don't reach the farmers who need them. The smallest commercial agri-drone setup costs tens of thousands of dollars and demands a specialist pilot. For a smallholder cacao farmer in Davao, that's not a tool — it's an impossibility.

Obstacle 01

Drones are too expensive.

A DJI Agras-class setup with the sensors needed for crop-health work starts in the tens of thousands. For a smallholder cacao farmer in Davao, that's not a tool — it's an impossibility.

Obstacle 02

Progress is too slow.

When the equipment is too expensive to risk, no one new gets trained. Coverage stays narrow, the bottleneck never opens, and farms wait weeks between surveys.

Obstacle 03

Knowledge is siloed.

Hobbyist tutorials are half-finished and assume access to parts and shops that simply don't exist in rural Southeast Asia.

The world's best
free drone simulator.

The best free online drone simulator — realistic physics, real maps, and multiple mission types. Practice flying before you ever leave the ground, or just play for fun. No download, no account required.

Explore the simulator ↗ Play now

Model any drone.
Before you build it.

The only open-source build calculator that models thrust, speed, agility, flight time, and payload capacity from any motor, propeller, and battery combination — corrected for real-world field conditions.

T:W
Thrust-to-weight
m/s
Top speed
min
Flight time
kg
Payload margin
Open the calculator ↗ View tested combos
Build calculator Flyable
7" Survey · EMAX 2807 · 7×3.5 · 6S 1300mAh
3.8:1
T:W ratio
18.4
Min flight
22 m/s
Top speed
Hover throttle34%
All-up weight892 g
Payload margin+485 g
Static thrust (4 motors)3,390 g
Current draw (hover)12.8 A
ⓘ Real-world corrected for 50m ASL, 30°C, Davao del Sur conditions. Spec-sheet values are ~12% higher.

Every flight
feeds a platform.

Every Lumipad survey uploads automatically to our platform — where computer-vision models turn raw imagery into the data farmers actually want. Available on the web for analysis, and via our mobile app for in-the-field flight planning and review.

  • Tree counts and canopy mapping
  • NDVI and vegetation indices
  • Pest and disease detection
  • Canopy gap analysis
  • Yield estimates
  • Change-over-time monitoring

Free for every Lumipad graduate

Graduates of our training program get unlimited access to the platform — for the businesses they run, the farms they survey, and the cooperatives they serve. Their flights become their work product, their portfolio, their evidence.

Open to research partners

The same platform powers our partnerships with academic institutions studying smallholder agriculture, non-profits running deforestation and climate programs, and community stakeholders who need usable data about their own land. The flights pay for the science.

Partner Spotlight: Kennemer Foods International

Kennemer Foods — cacao farming in Mindanao Kennemer Foods · Mindanao
Kennemer Foods International

Kennemer Foods International is a Philippine agribusiness supporting smallholder farmers across cacao, coffee and coconut value chains — from planting materials and training, through to market access.

Kennemer is one of Lumipad's key partners in Mindanao. Their cooperative network across the Davao region connects us with the farming communities who benefit most from affordable drone surveys — and their deep relationships with smallholder farmers helped shape how we designed the training program.

Together, we're putting drone-powered crop survey data into the hands of the people who work the land — supporting Kennemer's cacao-preneur initiative and helping farmers meet new EU deforestation regulations (EUDR). Every drone in the field is one more data point keeping a farmer connected to global markets.

Visit Kennemer →

Proudly in the Philippines.
Proudly Filipino.

Flag of the Philippines
  • i. Designed for community organisations, agri-cooperatives, NGOs and educators
  • ii. Cohorts run quarterly
  • iii. No tuition — your time is the contribution

There's a workbench
waiting for you.

Our next cohort opens in September 2026 in Mindanao. We accept community members, agri-cooperative staff, and partner-org trainees from across Mindanao, Visayas and Palawan. No prior experience with electronics or flying is required — just show up ready to learn and build.

100% Free Tuition, training, parts and a working drone — all included for every qualified participant.

What you get when you join.

  • 01Six weeks of hands-on training with simulators, soldering, and full flight school.
  • 02A fully assembled, calibrated Lumipad Quad — yours to keep, fly and earn with.
  • 03Lifetime access to the parts library, repair help, and the Lumipad pilot community.
  • 04A starter business kit: pricing, contracts, and intros to nearby cooperatives.
  • 05Free, lifetime access to the Lumipad platform and mobile app — tree counts, NDVI imagery, pest detection and yield estimates for every survey you fly.
Apply now ↗