Lumipad
Cohort 03 · Mindanao · Jun 2026

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 & 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

Alumni 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
The Problem

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

The price excludes the people doing the farming.

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

One drone, one specialist, one field at a time.

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

The DIY community is huge — but disorganised.

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

Open plans. Open parts lists.
Open to anyone, anywhere.

Every drone we build is documented end-to-end — photographs, BOMs, wiring diagrams, firmware notes, lessons learned. The whole catalogue is free to download, fork, and translate.

PARTS

Motor, prop & battery primer

A primer on motor, propeller, and battery combinations for 5-inch, 7-inch, and 10-inch quadcopter frames — the relationships, the tradeoffs, and typical Lumipad combos.

Browse list ↗ BUILD

Lumipad Quad v1 — Bill of Materials

The complete parts list for the v1 airframe, with quantities, model numbers, and a target build cost breakdown.

Download BOM ↗ SENSORS

NDVI camera build — Raspberry Pi guide

Step-by-step build for a low-cost NDVI rig that mounts to any Lumipad airframe — components, assembly, lens swap, and data pipeline included.

Open guide ↗ CURRICULUM

The 6-week training playbook

Day-by-day lesson plans, slides and assessments used by Lumipad trainers — adaptable to any partner organisation.

Get the playbook ↗ SAFETY

CAAP regulation primer

Plain-language summary of Philippine drone rules: registration, altitude limits, no-fly zones, agricultural exemptions.

Read primer ↗ BUSINESS

Run a drone microenterprise

Pricing templates, sample invoices, contracts in Filipino, and a starter spreadsheet for tracking jobs across barangays.

Open kit ↗
View all resources ↗
The Lumipad platform · Web · iOS · Android

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

Free for every Lumipad alumnus

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.

Open tool

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.
Drone build
Drone build
Drone build
Drone build

Backed by Kennemer Foods.
Made in Mindanao, for Mindanao.

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.

Lumipad started inside Kennemer's GIS & remote-sensing team. The brief was simple: surveys are bottlenecked by expensive drones and scarce pilots. So instead of buying more, build cheaper — and put them in the hands of the people who already work the land.

The program now feeds directly into Kennemer's cacao-preneur initiative and supports compliance with new EU deforestation regulations (EUDR). Every drone in the field is one more data point keeping a farmer connected to global markets.

Visit Kennemer →

There's a workbench
waiting for you.

Cohort 03 opens in June 2026 in Mindanao. We accept community members, agri-cooperative staff, and partner-org trainees from across Mindanao, Visayas and Palawan.

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

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 alumni network.
  • 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.

From anywhere
in the world.

Not in Mindanao? Join our remote cohort and run the Lumipad model in your own community — with virtual support, drone parts shipped to your door, and the full open library of training materials.

100% Free Training, parts and a working drone — all included for every qualified participant. Participants only cover any local import duties on shipped parts.
Eligibility & qualifications ↗
Apply to the remote cohort ↗
  • 01

    Virtual support

    Live workshops, weekly office hours, and 1:1 mentorship from Lumipad trainers — all conducted online in English, Tagalog or Cebuano.

  • 02

    A drone kit, shipped

    Every remote participant receives the same parts kit our Mindanao cohorts build with — motors, ESCs, flight controller, frame, battery — sent directly from our Davao workshop.

  • 03

    The full open library

    Plans, parts lists, wiring diagrams, and the six-week curriculum — every resource our local program uses, free under Creative Commons.

  • 04

    The Lumipad platform & mobile app

    Upload every survey from our mobile app and receive tree counts, NDVI imagery, pest and disease detection, and yield estimates for the farms you serve — free for the life of your program.

Made in the Philippines

Proudly 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