The $100 Tri-copter

August 24, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 26 Comments

We’ve seen lots of budget tri-copters, but $100 seems like a heck of a deal to us! Watching this video, you can see this home made tri-copter is incredibly agile and seems to handle quite well. Whats amazing is that [hallstudio] claims that it cost roughly $100. That price is really good compared to even the cheapest multi copters out there.

Much of the manufacturing cost associated with this kind of thing has been removed as the body is just cheap wood from the local hardware store. He even did an admittedly sloppy rig for his tail rotor, not that it looks like it has hurt his performance. One cool feature is the fact that you can fold the front arms backward, allowing for the tri-copter to be shoved into a bag for easy transportation.

You can find a complete parts list on his video, but it looks like maybe his cost doesn’t figure in the cost of the radio controller. There are no build instructions, but a quick google search leads us to the rcexplorer tricopter which seems to be the template he used. There are full build details there.

[via Hackedgadgets]

Extending The Range Of The AR Drone, 2 Ways.

August 23, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 50 Comments

As I mentioned earlier, we’ve got an AR Drone to play with. One of the common mods that popped up on the internet were ways of extending the range on the AR Drone. It normally uses a local Wi-Fi connection to your phone or tablet for control and video signals. Many found this quite restrictive and have gone pretty far in extending that range.

The first and easiest was just to set up a higher power Wi-Fi Bridge where you’ll be flying. The Drone only has about 15db of wi-fi magic in it, so anything stronger than that is an improvement. There were too many variations on this to delve into the details, but as you see, there’s not much too it.

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Hacking The AR Drone: Intro

August 23, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 46 Comments

Ever since we played with the original AR drone back at CES a few years ago, we’ve been keeping an eye on them. While we all agree there are better quadcopters out there, the price point for a ready-to-fly quadcopter of this size is really great with these.

When the fake video from FPS Russia of the weaponized drone made the rounds earlier this year, we were surprised at how people reacted. Anyone who has messed with quadcopters recognized it as fake right off the bat (not to mention the overly cliche fake russian character).

We won’t be adding a full fledged firearm to this. Mainly because it simply can’t lift the weight (There are ones that can, but we couldn’t justify the cost just for that). We do have some ideas though.

Lets go over the specs of the AR Drone 2.0 first.

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New And Improved Old Hackaday Store!

August 20, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 20 Comments

I am going to start off by saying our zazzle store was pretty sad. The prices were just way too high. I put that store into place because frankly, the one I was running was a pain in the butt.

The good news is that I’ve got a new system in place. It is bright and shiny and looks much easier to use. Not only that, but since we’re not using someone like zazzle, we’re keeping the cost down! Or standard shirts are $18. We have stickers too, and this time, we have both standard stickers as well as the custom cut vinyl decals everyone loved before.

Several products have not yet arrived. Since this is the grand opening and I feel a little bad about how expensive the zazzle store was, I’m running a special. $16 for shirts if they’re ordered before August 31st.

I’m talking to other people about offering some products besides shirts and stickers in the store. Stay tuned to see what we’ve got going on!

Expand Your Pi With A Gertboard

August 18, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 18 Comments

[Gert van Loo], the person who designed the alpha hardware for the Raspberry pi model B, has put out an expansion board for the Raspberry pi that we think many of you might be interested in seeing. Dubbed the Gertboard, this expands the Raspi with some GPIO goodness.

We have seen TONS of tutorials for the Raspberry pi, and a few projects as well. We’re hoping that we’ll start seeing more projects where the Raspberry pi is the brain, but only part of the project, start becoming more frequent. The board is pretty cool, now lets see what you guys can build with all that power!

[thanks Zimm3rmann]

Making The Arduino Sleep The Long Sleep

August 18, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 23 Comments

Earlier this week, I showed you [Naim Busek’s] kickstarter for his turn signal helmet. In that article I explained that, while the helmet is a neat idea, I was really interested in what [Naim] had told me about his power consumption. To put it the shortest way, he has made his arduino sleep so efficiently, it can be waiting for input longer than the battery’s optimum shelf life.

After that article, [Naim] wrote in to give me the details on what he did to achieve such an efficient system. You can read his entire explanation, un altered here.

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We’re Getting An Oculus Rift Dev Kit

August 17, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 35 Comments

Before you get jealous of the massive amount of sway that hackaday must’ve tossed at these guys to get a dev kit, don’t be. We just funded the kickstarter like everyone else. This is exciting news though since, as you probably know, I’m very fond of immersive gaming and have always craved a strong VR rig.

We are expecting our dev kit some time in December. I have no idea exactly what we’ll do with it. Right now [John Carmak] has made the iD engine work with it and it ships with Doom3. They’ve stated that it will work with the Unreal engine as well. Even though I saw [Gabe Newell] from valve in the video, I don’t see any source engine compatibility in the list. I really would love to see that one added, especially since Valve released the source film maker for free.

So, who has ideas about what to do with this? I’d like to build a telepresence rig with stereo vision, possibly mounted on a radio controlled car chassis.