drone hacks

510 Articles

Lighting Up The Night Sky With A Flying POV Display

December 19, 2018 by 14 Comments

We’ve seen loads of persistence of vision displays before, but this sky-writing POV display seems as though it may be a first. And we have to agree with its creators that it’s pretty cool.

The idea man on this was [Ivan Miranda], who conceived of a flying POV as a twist on his robotic dot-matrix beach printer. But without any experience in RC flight, he turned to fellow YouTuber [Tom Stanton], whose recent aerial builds include this air-powered plane, for a collaboration. [Ivan]’s original concept was a long strip of Neopixels that would be attached to the underside of a wide-wingspread plane. WIthout much regard for the payload limits of most RC planes, he came up with a working display that was 3 meters long. His video below shows it in use in his shop, with some pretty impressive long exposure images.

[Tom]’s part was to make the POV display flyable. He cut the length down to 2 meters and trimmed the weight enough to mount it to a quadcopter. Ungainly as the machine was, he was able to master its control enough to start painting pictures across the twilight sky. The images at the end of his video are actually stunning – we’re especially fond of Thunderbird 2, which takes us back to our childhood.

We’re not sure what the practical uses of this are, but that’s hardly the point. It’s enough that it’s an interesting project from an unlikely duo. Continue reading “Lighting Up The Night Sky With A Flying POV Display” →

FPV Antenna Leans Into The Bank

December 2, 2018 by 23 Comments

If you’re doing remote controlled flight, odds are you’re also flying FPV. Or you at least have a camera on board. If you’re transmitting to the ground, you may have noticed the antenna on your plane has some weird radiation patterns; bank your plane to the left or right, and your signal gets worse. [Ant0003] over on Thingiverse has a great solution to this problem that’s small, lightweight, and will fit into just about any airframe.

[Ant]’s flying a Mini Talon with FPV, and since planes turn slower than drones, and can fly much further than multicopters, the radiation pattern of the antenna is very important. In this case, [Ant] wants to keep the antenna perpendicular to the ground. This problem was solved with a cheap 9-gram servo and a few 3D printed parts that hold an SMA connector. One end of this wire goes to the video transmitter, and the antenna is screwed into the other end.

A servo alone does not make the antenna point straight up. To do this, [Ant] needed to program his flight controller. He’s using iNav, and a few clicks of the mouse makes one servo channel do whatever the gyroscope isn’t doing. The results (video below) speak for themselves. It’s an antenna that always points straight up, which is exactly what this video transmitter needed.

Continue reading “FPV Antenna Leans Into The Bank” →

Tiny Drone Racing Gates Use Up Those Filament Scraps

November 27, 2018 by 6 Comments

Drone racing comes in different shapes and sizes, and some multirotor racers can be very small indeed. Racing means having gates to fly though, and here’s a clever DIY design by [Qgel] that uses a small 3D printed part and a segment of printer filament as the components for small-scale drone racing gates.

The base is 3D printed as a single piece and is not fussy about tolerances, meanwhile the gate itself is formed from a segment of printer filament. Size is easily adjusted, they disassemble readily, are cheap to produce, and take up very little space. In short, perfect for its intended purpose.

Races benefit from being able to measure lap time, and that led to DIY drone racing transponders, complete with a desktop client for managing the data. Not all flying is about racing, but pilots with racing skills were key to getting results in this Star Wars fan film that used drones. Finally, those who still feel that using the word “drone” to include even palm-sized racers is too broad of a use may be interested in [Brian Benchoff]’s research into the surprisingly long history of the word “drone” and its historically broad definition.

Blimpduino Hits Version 2

November 27, 2018 by 17 Comments

We always think that crossing the Atlantic in a blimp would be very serene — at least once they put heaters on board. The Hindenburg, the R-101, and the Shenandoah put an end to the age of the airship, at least for commercial passenger travel. But you can still fly your own with a helium balloon and some electronics. One notable project — the Blimpduino — has evolved into the Blimpduino 2. The open-source software is on GitHub. We couldn’t find the PCB layout, so we aren’t sure if it is or will be open. The 3D printed parts are available, though.

The PCB is the heart of the matter, a four-layer board with an ARM M0 processor, an ESP8266 WiFi module, four motor outputs, two servo motor outputs, a 9-axis inertial navigation system, an altimeter, and a forward object detection system. There’s also a battery charger onboard.

Continue reading “Blimpduino Hits Version 2” →

Fail Of The Week: Leaf Blowers Can’t Fly

November 12, 2018 by 31 Comments

Leaf blowers, the main instrument of the suburban Saturday symphony, are one of the most useful nuisances. It doesn’t take much work with a rake to convince even the most noise-averse homeowner to head to the Big Box Store to pick one up to speed lawn chores. Once you do buy one, and feel the thrust produced by these handheld banshees, you might wonder, If I let go of this thing, would it fly? 

[Peter Sripol] had that very thought and set about building a couple of leaf blower powered planes to answer the question. It’s probably not a spoiler alert to report that the answer is no, but the video below is a fun watch anyway. The surprising thing is just how close both planes came to succeeding. The first plane was a stripped-down Ryobi two-stroke leaf blower suspended from a giant wing and tail section that very nearly got off the ground. Version 1.1 gained a retractable electric boost propeller – strictly for take-offs – and lost a lot of excess weight. That plane practically leaped into the air, but alas, servo problems prevented [Peter] from shutting down the electric and flying on Ryobi alone. Even a servo fix couldn’t save the next flight, which cratered right after takeoff. A version 2.0, this time using a brutally modified electric leaf blower, was slightly more airworthy but augured in several times before becoming unflyable.

What can we learn from all this? Not much other than it would take a lot of effort to make a leaf blower fly. We appreciate all of [Peter]’s hard work here, but we think he’s better off concentrating on his beautiful homebrew ultralight instead.

Continue reading “Fail Of The Week: Leaf Blowers Can’t Fly” →

An Englishman’s Home Is His (Drone-Defended) Castle

November 9, 2018 by 24 Comments

Retiring to the garden for a few reflective puffs on the meerschaum and a quick shufti through the Racing Post, and the peace of the afternoon is shattered by the buzz of a drone in the old airspace,what! What’s a chap to do, let loose with both barrels of the finest birdshot from the trusty twelve-bore? Or build a missile battery cunningly concealed in a dovecote? The latter is what [secretbatcave] did to protect his little slice of England, and while we’re not sure of its efficacy we’re still pretty taken with it. After all, who wouldn’t want a useless garden accoutrement that conceals a fearsome 21st century defence system?

The basic shell of the dovecote is made from laser cut ply, in the shape of an innocuous miniature house. The roof is in two sliding sections which glide apart upon servo-controlled drawer runners, and concealed within is the rocket launcher itself on a counterweighted arm to lift it through the opening. The (toy) rocket itelf is aimed with a camera pan/tilt mechanism,and the whole is under the control of a Raspberry Pi

It’s understood that this is a rather tongue-in-cheek project, and the chances of any multirotors falling out of the sky are somewhat remote. But it does serve also to bring a bit of light back onto a theme Hackaday have touched upon in previous years, that of the sometimes uneasy relationship between drone and public.

Tilt-Rotor Plane Needs Flight Controller Hack To Get Airborne

November 6, 2018 by 6 Comments

Part of the charm of quadcopters is the challenge that building and flying them presents. In need of complex sensors and computational power to just get off the ground and under tremendous stresses thanks to their massively powerful motors, they often seem only barely controlled in flight. Despite these challenges, quadcopter flight has been reduced to practice in many ways, leaving hobbyists in search of another challenge.

[Tom Stanton] is scratching his creative itch with this radio-controlled tilt-rotor airplane that presents some unique problems and opportunities. Tilt-rotor planes are, as the name implies, able to swivel their propellors and transition them from providing forward thrust to providing verticle lift. With the rotors providing lift, the aircraft is able to hover and perform vertical take-off and landing (VTOL); switched to thrust mode, wings provide the lift for horizontal flight.

[Tom]’s realization of this design seems simple – a spar running through the wing holding BLDC motors and props is swiveled through 90° by a servo to transition the aircraft. Standard control surfaces on the wings and tail take care of horizontal flight. Actually getting an off-the-shelf flight controller to deal with the transitions was tricky. [Tom] ended up adding an Arduino to intercept the PWM signals the flight controller normally sends directly to the servos and speed controls to provide the coordination needed for a smooth transition. Full details in the video below, and some test flights which show that an RC VTOL is anything but a beginner’s plane.

[Tom] is proving himself to be quite the Renaissance man these days. Between air-powered piston engines, over-balance trebuchets, and popping the perfect wheelie, he seems to have covered all the bases and done his best to keep our tip line stocked.

Continue reading “Tilt-Rotor Plane Needs Flight Controller Hack To Get Airborne” →