[Abhimanyu Kumar] has been hard at work building and posting about his quadcopter. So far he’s published ten installments for this build, letting us relive the adventure vicariously. But it’s number 11 that we’re really excited about as he plans to share the first free-flight footage in that one.
The bug was planted in his brain after hearing that a quadcopter was used to shoot some of the footage in Spiderman 2. He wanted one to call his very own but the cost of a ready-made unit was out of his league. So he decided to build one instead. The first version uses aluminum bracket for the cross making up the motor mounts. He added LEDs to liven things up and even made a demo video of the thing tied to a table (no IMU yet so free flight would be fatal). After this stepping stone he decided to go with a Wii Motion Plus and Wii Nunchuck as the positioning feedback sensors. There is also a body redesign with helps lighten the load.
It’s a fun project, and we can’t wait to see where he goes from here!
Cool!! NEED to finish up mine too. Waiting for #11
i was thinking of taking the many micro havoc heli’s i have and making one of these. it doesn’t look too hard. also those micro heli’s can lift about 14 grams each so I think it would easily do it.. I like the build, definitely looks like you’d be able to carry a camera on it. Kudos. Quadrocopters rule! ( why we don’t use em in real life situations is beyond me?)
WE dont use them for sustainability and efficiency – well thats what i think atleast – why have 4 motors when you can do with 2. and the more the moving parts the bigger the maintenance and 4 motors means 4 energy hungry components.
what ya think guys>
Probably also has alot todo with the issues of a failing rotor on engine. Would just fall out of the sky
Well phil, I’ve been building quadcopters and tricopters for a while now and actually tricopters and bicopters are significantly more mechanically complicated than quads. They both need servos which is considered a pretty serious weak point compared to quads (I still love my tri, its incredibly stable). and with brushless motors, I have to try pretty hard to burn a motor. Then again I prop within spec of my system so until a bearing fails from long term usage, the motors are good to go. All in all, the quad is a good number to be at.
Your point about multi-rotors being power hungry can be true, imagine hexas and octos, those need some battery power. They also end up being able to carry lots of weight and/or punch out unbelievably quickly. The other downfalls of these are, more props = more vibration to find and eliminate.
Helicopters have one big advantage which is ‘auto-rotation’. This means you can land the bird safely even if the engine fails. Also, when you scale to full size, a helicopter is very stable and as @philip stated there’s less to maintain and it’s more efficient.
(Fun build, can’t wait to see it fly btw :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorotation_%28helicopter%29
Theory of flight for helicopters:
they are so ugly, the earth repels them.
:-)
soopergoman: I think it’d come down to cost really. Well, if we’re talking about full size helicopters…
>He wanted one to call his very own but the cost of a ready-made unit was out of his league
Theory #1 he’s a hobo and really bad at begging
Theory #2 he never heard of China…