Spoofing GPS and getting your own UAV

drone

A couple folks over at the Radionavigation Lab at UT Austin successfully spoofed GPS to take control of a small helicopter drone this weekend. Of course, this attracted the attention of the Department of Homeland security, so you'd better stock up on GPS spoofing equipment while there's still time. The DHS, CIA, and US Military have a huge interest in spoofing GPS; Iran stole a drone late … [Read more...]

Awesome little UAV flies 1 km

UAV

After going to an SMD soldering workshop at the Stuttgart hackerspace ShackSpace, [Corvus] decided to be an over achiever and build a flight controller for his very own unmanned aerial vehicle. The airplane itself is a regular store-bought foam contraption, and not terribly interesting in and of itself. Autonomous flight piques some interest, though. A custom flight controller PCB was designed … [Read more...]

Engine Hacks: A pulse jet UAV by any other name would still be a cruise missile

jet

Imagine our surprise when we learned [Bruce Simpson], who made headlines in 2003 with his $5000 DIY cruise missile, is still alive, not illegally interned in a black ops prison, and still doing what he does best: building really awesome remote-control airplanes. The first successful mass-produced pulse jet aircraft was the German V-1 flying bomb. The V-1 had a very primitive guidance system, … [Read more...]

WASP UAV gets some new toys, now intercepts your phone calls too

wasp_drone

If you had the pleasure of attending last year’s DEFCON conference, you are no doubt familiar with [Mike Tassey] and [Richard Perkins]. There, the pair showed off a work in progress DIY aerial drone named WASP. Short for Wireless Aerial Surveillance Platform, WASP was impressive when we brought it to your attention last year, but the duo has spent some time completing their project, adding a few … [Read more...]

Augmented reality UAV controller

augmented-reality-uav-control

Controlling a long-range unmanned aerial vehicle is much easier if you have an augmented reality system like [Fabien Blanc-Paques] built. On board the aircraft you'll find a sensor suite and camera, both transmitting data back to the operator. As the title of this post indicates, the display the operator sees is augmented with this data, including altitude, speed, and a variety of super-handy … [Read more...]

Drone cracks WiFi from on high

drone-wifi-cracker

The WiFi Aerial Surveillance Platform, or WASP for short, is an autonomous drone aircraft that sniffs out WiFi networks. But it packs a much larger punch than that. Built into this US Army surplus target drone you'll find an ITX form-factor computer with a Via C7 500 MHz processor that is running Backtrack 4, the popular penetration testing Linux suite. But what if you want to do some real heavy … [Read more...]

Aircraft carrier is moving target for autonomous quadcopter

autonomous-quadcopter

[Karl-Engelbert Wenzel] developed a UAV capable of taking off and landing on a moving platform autonomously. The platform operates aircraft-carrier-style by driving around the room in circles. The quadcopter tracks a grid of IR LEDs at the front of the landing deck by using the IR camera from a Wii remote. The best part is that the flight controls and processing are all done by the copter's … [Read more...]