Turning Anything Into A Drone

drone

For his graduate project, [Jasper] wanted to do something with a quadcopter drone. Not content with simply building any old drone, he decided to make a kit that turns anything into a drone. Everything from a bicycle wheel, to a computer keyboard, and even a phone is more than able to take flight with [Jasper]’s Drone It Yourself kit.

The DIY drone kit consists of a few 3D printed parts that include four clamps and mounts for the four engines. Also on board are ESCs, a battery, receiver, and an OpenPilot autopilot that will hopefully keep a drone in any shape imaginable hovering in the air. All this packaged in a sleek aluminum briefcase make it look like something out of an eccentric Bond film parody.

This project isn’t for sale – at least until the Brookstone catalog steals the idea – but you can get the bill of materials directly from [Jasper], just in case you’d like to make your own random flying object.

24 thoughts on “Turning Anything Into A Drone

    1. Hi ATC,
      If you look at the kit, you will see four white extenders in the top left corner. You can put those in the clamps and than put the motor pieces in there to create some more space. It does work

  1. Great idea. I’ve always wanted to make an airborne monster display, now I can.

    The plan here is to get a few hundred broken R/C helis, replace the clapped out Li+ batteries with e-cig batteries and 3D print the props to use the existing pair of motors.
    The existing gear trains and shafts can be recycled.

    Add 4*3W RGB LEDs on stalks and voila, instant airborne display.
    The trick part would be power management but this could be worked around by powering the setup from the ground via 100W phased IR array on the brightest sectors in a round robin fashion.

  2. This has got to be included in the next Bond film. May be a giant version that can be fitted to a car, a caravan or a boat. Or, is it too close to Scaramanga’s flying car?

  3. “Dude, I’m across campus, I got a flat and no pump, can you help me out?”, “Can I help you out? HELL YEA!” Anyway this would be good to get a smartphone in the air, have it send video back to you (and I know this kit looks too big for a phone, just duct tape the phone to a piece of light particle board.)

  4. Seems like he could definitely re-design the shape of the clamps and extenders to make them lighter and quicker to set up.
    Other than that, could be a useful thing to transport oddly shaped objects around

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