@Matthew Restko

Some german guys hang around the RC Groups forums in the multirotor section, there is a big thread on the mikrocopters.

Can anyone explain what the benefits of more than say 3 blades would be?

If you have more blades you have some kind of redundancy.
if you, for example hit an object or there is an malfunction and the blades brake or the motor stops working, this thing is flyable. you can land it safely.

As far as i know the altitude can be hold acurately be 20 mm with a air pressure sensor.

Don’t know if you guys know what i mean. My english is not that good burt my german is ;)

Greetings from Austria

Simply stunning!

The stability & speed is amazing, with some sonar distance sensors added I’m guessing it would make it fairly crash-proof in an urban environment.

I’ve wanted a decent four-blade coptor ever since I first saw them, but stuff that, now I want a six-bladed one! :D

Dang, but that thing is quick!

It’s a good day for copter posts. I wish I had me a hexacopter, and one of these: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/02/triceracopter.html

There is more to it then the kopter itself. The Quadrokopters/Hexacopters/Optokopters are sold as a kit only – otherwise the shipping charges would be exponential. If somebody wants to get engaged, there are a few things to know upfront. Here are a few links to get you thinking:
Things to consider before buying: http://nghobbies.com/forum/index.php?topic=30.0
Functions:
http://nghobbies.com/forum/index.php?topic=31.0
Transmitter selection:
http://nghobbies.com/forum/index.php?topic=32.0
Skills required for this project:
http://nghobbies.com/forum/index.php?topic=33.0

Make sure you read these to have a better understanding. All these pages are in English, so it should be easy enough.

Holy crap, it’s a hoverdrone (from Dark Angel)! I’ve also been interested in building a ridable version for a while, but you can’t scale a quadricopter up enough because the rotors get too big, you have to make them variable pitch instead of fixed pitch, and it just becomes more practical to make a helicopter. With this approach I can really see 8 – 10 small (12-18″) rotors working in a rideable ‘flying saucer’ configuration. Ideal power source would be nanophosphate lithium batteries but as yet they still only give a flight time of a few minutes; maybe a hybrid drive with a central ~100kW engine generating electricity to run a bunch of 10kW fixed pitch rotors?

sehr gut.

thats how to put something to good use. nicely done

Check out the latest podcast from DIYDrones.com there is an OpenSource being workedon called OpenPilot that has much better hardware and will be much cheaper as well.

Not talking about the wonderful Halloween applications… I flew this ghost under a 400mm quadrokopter…

http://vimeo.com/2076007

@mick – thats actually a really good idea.

How does the drive shaft work?

And Taylor you want to ‘build’ one…

It’s fairly unrealistic to think you could mount a gun on one of those. Imagine the amount of recoil even just a 9mm round does on a 150 lb human being let alone a ~20 lb helicopter.

Sorry, correction: two transistors are enough for regenerative braking, if you have a DC motor. I mixed that up with another circuit. An H-bridge is needed for a single phase AC motor to invert the polarity.

In this case you have a three-phase motor and you even need six MOSFETs.

@autogiro: Not sure your comment about the paper airplanes really works as a good argument about aerodynamics (though I don’t disagree about the difficulty of scaling)

A paper airplane is generally a glider that is initially launched with a lot of force. If you were to launch a 100meter long, meter thick paper airplane with the scaled-up force of a human throwing a small paper plane, it would probably glide a bit, but you never see it because it’s pointless and would be quite expensive and difficult to set up.

That being said, I’d like to see it anyway.

GO GO GADGET HEXACOPTER!!!

Omg, the Germans really DO make great stuff. Imagine flying in one of these the way Inspector Gadget does, or at least hovering.

the xexacopter is the koolist thing i have ever saw ….. tell me where i can buy one and of course the price too …… thanks

@SirWesley – Very cool idea. Also image if you could check to see if it was online, and then send it an im asking for a coke. That would be cool