Radio control toys can be great fun to play with. However, at the bottom end of the market, sometimes you find you’ve bought something that just doesn’t work quite right. [saulemmetquinn] found that with a cheap RC helicopter, and set about re-engineering the design in Tinkercad.
The entire frame of the original helicopter was discarded, replaced with one made out of CAD-designed and 3D printed components. The end result is far lighter and less cumbersome than the original design, while also managing to look a lot more like an actual helicopter. It also served to correct some of the problems which [saulemmetquinn] stated made the original toy difficult to fly.
Assembling your own tiny helicopter motors and mechanisms would be quite difficult, and time consuming. [saulemmetquinn] was instead able to leverage the good parts of the original design, and build something better from that. It’s very much the essence of hacking, right there.
We’ve seen other toy helicopters hacked too, like the famous Syma S107G. If you’ve got your own tiny flying hacks, be sure to drop us a line.
Comment on photo: I had to go to the instructable to figure out which photo was the original. Seems common here to put the hack on left, original on right. Unsure why that is, but it’s counterintuitive to me. Probably it feels like they should be in chronological order left to right.
Solid hack though.
Given that the one on the right looks like it was designed by the kind of person who creates ads to run during children’s cartoons, I kind of was hoping that the one on the left was the hack. But now I’m scared to look :-).
These got sooooo much easier to fly when they started adding MEMS gyroscopes to the designs.
How in hell does it steer?
They both have tailrotors