X-wing Aircraft Are Trickier Than They Look

November 4, 2025 by Donald Papp 17 Comments

The iconic X-wing ship design from Star Wars is something many a hobbyist have tried to recreate, and not always with success. While [German engineer] succeeded in re-imagining an FPV quadcopter as an X-wing fighter, the process also highlighted why there have been more failures than successes when it comes to DIY X-wing aircraft.

For one thing, the X-wing shape is not particularly aerodynamic. It doesn’t make a very good airplane. Quadcopters on the other hand rely entirely on precise motor control to defy gravity in a controlled way. It occurred to [German engineer] that if one tilts their head just so, an X-wing fighter bears a passing resemblance to a rocket-style quadcopter layout, so he set out to CAD up a workable design.

When flying at speed, the aircraft goes nearly horizontal and the resemblance to an X-wing fighter is complete.

One idea that seemed ideal but ultimately didn’t work was using four EDF (electric ducted fan) motors mounted in the same locations as the four cylindrical engines on an X-wing. Motors large enough to fly simply wouldn’t fit without ruining the whole look. A workable alternative ended up being the four props and brushless motors mounted on the ends of the wings, like you see here.

The unit still needed a lot of fine tuning to get to a properly workable state, but it got there. It takes off and lands vertically, like a classical quadcopter, but when flying at speed it levels out almost completely and looks just like an X-wing as it screams by. It’s in sharp contrast to the slow, methodical movements of this Imperial Shuttle drone.

There are also a couple design elements in [German engineer]’s build we thought were notable. The spring-loaded battery door (all 3D-printed, including the spring) looks handy and keeps the lines of the aircraft clean. And since it’s intended to be flown as an FPV (first person view) aircraft, the tilting camera mount in the nose swings the camera 90 degrees during takeoff and landing to make things a little easier on the pilot.

3D models for the frame (along with a parts list) are up for anyone who wants to give it a shot. Check it out in the video, embedded below.

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POV Globe Takes To The Skies

October 22, 2025 by Tyler August 12 Comments

LED billboards are cyberpunk-dystopian enough for most, but it can get worse. For example, this project by [Concept Crafted Creations] that takes the whole concept and takes it airborn (literally) in the form of a flying POV sphere called “Zippy”.

We love persistence-of-vision (POV) displays, and have featured plenty before, from the very complicated to the fairly simple. The idea is simple: take one or more rings of LEDs and spin them rapidly enough that the persistence-of-vision effect creates a solid image in your visual field. We covered the basics years back. “Zippy” has one ring of addressable LEDs that surrounds the thing that makes it unique: the quadcopter at its core. None of those other projects could fly, after all.

You might imagine a big, spinning ring is going to have a lot of torque to cancel out, and that is true — about 2.3 kgf — and it led to a lot of prototypes crashing early on. After trying to use flaps to direct the downwash of the quadcopter rotors to counter the spin, [Concept Crafted Creations] eventually added two extra props for yaw control, and that seemed to do the trick. We say “quadcopter” because that’s the configuration, but Zippy ended up heavy and needs eight lift motors to fly. PVC pipe and PLA aren’t the lightest build materials, after all. That’s ten props, total, plus another outrunner to spin the POV ring. All those motors, plus the current draw of the LEDs means the flight time might not impress — but Zippy sure does, at last as long as the batteries hold out.

There’s something eye-catching about POV displays, and seeing this one drifting upwards like Kang and Kodos decided to steal the Los Vegas Sphere is even more arresting. That made the crash at the end of the video sad to see, but [Concept Crafted Creations] hasn’t ruled out rebuilding it if his viewers show enough interest. So if you like what you see, head over to YouTube and leave an encouraging comment for him to try, try again. Continue reading “POV Globe Takes To The Skies” →

Hackaday Links: September 28, 2025

September 28, 2025 by Dan Maloney 14 Comments

In today’s “News from the Dystopia” segment, we have a story about fighting retail theft with drones. It centers on Flock Safety, a company that provides surveillance technologies, including UAVs, license plate readers, and gunshot location systems, to law enforcement agencies. Their flagship Aerodome product is a rooftop-mounted dock for a UAV that gets dispatched to a call for service and acts as an eye-in-the-sky until units can arrive on scene. Neat idea and all, and while we can see the utility of such a system in a first responder situation, the company is starting to market a similar system to retailers and other private sector industries as a way to contain costs. The retail use case, which the story stresses has not been deployed yet, would be to launch a drone upon a store’s Asset Protection team noticing someone shoplifting. Flock would then remotely pilot the drone, following the alleged thief back to their lair or hideout and coordinating with law enforcement, who then sweep in to make an arrest.

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Drones At Danish Airports, A Plea For Responsible Official Response

September 27, 2025 by Jenny List 49 Comments

In Europe, where this is being written, and possibly further afield, news reports are again full of drone sightings closing airports. The reports have come from Scandinavia, in particular Denmark, where sightings have been logged across the country. It has been immediately suggested that the Russians might somehow be involved, something they deny, which adds a dangerous geopolitical edge to the story.

To us here at Hackaday, this is familiar territory. Back in the last decade, we covered the saga of British airports closing due to drone sightings. In that case, uninformed hysteria played a large part in the unfolding events, leading to further closures. The problem was that the official accounts did not seem credible. Eventually, after a lot of investigation and freedom of information requests by the British drone community, there was a shamefaced admission that there had never been any tangible evidence of a drone being involved.

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One-Motor Drone Mimics Maple Seeds For Stability

August 20, 2025 by Donald Papp 14 Comments

We’ve seen aircraft based on “helicopter” seeds (technically samara seeds, which include those of maples and elms) before, but this recent design from researchers at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) shows how a single small motor can power a spinning monocopter capable of active directed flight, including hovering.

The monocopter is essentially an optimized wing shape with a single motor and propeller at one end. Hardware-wise it might be simple, but the tradeoff is higher complexity in other areas. Physical layout and balance are critical to performance, and software-wise controlling what is basically a wing spinning itself at high speed is a complex task. The payoff is highly-efficient flight in a package that self-stabilizes; it weighs only 32 grams and has a flight time of 26 minutes, which is very impressive for a self-contained micro aircraft.

We saw what looks like an earlier version of this concept from SUTD that was capable of directed flight by modifying the airfoil surface, but like the seeds it was modeled after, it’s more of a glider. This unit has the same spinning-seed design, but is actively powered. A significant improvement, for sure.

For those who prefer their DIY micro aircraft a little more traditional-looking, be sure to check out the design details of a handmade and fully operational 1:96 scale P-51 Mustang that weighs only 2.9 grams. It even has retractable landing gear! When one can manage to keep mass to a bare minimum, a little power goes a long way.

Student Drone Flies, Submerges

August 5, 2025 by Al Williams 17 Comments

Admit it. You’d get through boring classes in school by daydreaming of cool things you’d like to build. If you were like us, some of them were practical, but some of them were flights of fancy. Did you ever think of an airplane that could dive under the water? We did. So did some students at Aalborg University. The difference is they built theirs. Watch it do its thing in the video below.

As far as we can tell, the drone utilizes variable-pitch props to generate lift in the air and downward thrust in water. In addition to the direction of the thrust, water operations require a lower pitch to minimize drag. We’d be interested in seeing how it is all waterproofed, and we’re unsure how deep the device can go. No word on battery life either. From the video, we aren’t sure how maneuverable it is while submerged, but it does seem to have some control. It wouldn’t be hard to add a lateral thruster to improve underwater operations.

This isn’t the first vehicle of its kind (discounting fictional versions). Researchers at Rutgers created something similar in 2015, and we’ve seen other demonstrations, but this is still very well done, especially for a student project.

We did see a submersible drone built using parts from a flying drone. Cool, but not quite the same.

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Power Line Patrols: The Grid’s Eye In The Sky

July 29, 2025 by Dan Maloney 18 Comments

Those of us who like to monitor air traffic with ADS-B aggregators such as FlightAware and ADS-B Exchange tend to see some interesting flight paths. I’m not talking about the truly ambitious pictures drawn by pilots, or even the more ribald ones, but rather flights that follow paths that seem to make little sense from either a commercial or leisure standpoint.

Most of these mystery flights have long straight stretches interrupted by occasional tight loops, and often cover great distances across rural and urban landscapes alike. A glance at the ADS-B data indicates that these flights are usually pretty close to the ground, and are often completed by helicopters. Occasionally, the registration of the aircraft will even indicate ownership by some “three-letter” federal agency.

Although mystery helicopters flying odd patterns in the sky seems like a good excuse to don a tinfoil hat and head to one’s bunker, chances are pretty good that these aircraft are engaged in a far less nefarious and far more useful endeavour: aerial transmission line patrols. These flights are key to keeping the transmission lines that form the backbone of the grid in tip-top shape, especially at a time of unprecedented growth in load and a shift in the generation profile away from fossil fuels towards renewables.

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