Hackaday Links: February 9, 2025

February 9, 2025 by Dan Maloney 15 Comments

January 9 ended up being a very expensive day for a Culver City, California man after he pleaded guilty to recklessly operating a drone during the height of the Pacific Palisades wildfire. We covered this story a bit when it happened (second item), which resulted in the drone striking and damaging the leading edge of a Canadian “Super Scooper” plane that was trying to fight the fire. Peter Tripp Akemann, 56, admitted to taking the opportunity to go to the top of a parking garage in Santa Monica and launching his drone to get a better view of the action to the northwest. Unfortunately, the drone got about 2,500 meters away, far beyond visual range and, as it turns out, directly in the path of the planes refilling their tanks by skimming along the waters off Malibu. The agreement between Akemann and federal prosecutors calls for a guilty plea along with full restitution to the government of Quebec, which owns the damaged plane, plus the costs of repair. Akemann needs to write a check for $65,169 plus perform 150 hours of community service related to the relief effort for the fire’s victims. Expensive, yes, but probably better than the year in federal prison such an offense could have earned him.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: February 9, 2025” →

Hackaday Links: January 26, 2025

January 26, 2025 by Dan Maloney 7 Comments

Disappointing news this week for those longing for same-hour Amazon delivery as the retail giant tapped the brakes on its Prime Air drone deliveries. The pause is partially blamed on a December incident at the company’s Pendleton, Oregon test facility, where two MK30 delivery drones collided in midair during light rain conditions. A Bloomberg report states that the crash, which resulted in one of the drones catching fire on the ground, was due to a software error related to the weather. As a result, they decided to ground their entire fleet, which provides 60-minute delivery to test markets in Arizona and Texas, until a software update can be issued.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: January 26, 2025” →

DIY Drones Deliver The Goods With Printed Release

January 22, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 17 Comments

It seems like the widespread use of delivery drones by companies like Amazon and Wal-Mart has been perpetually just out of reach. Of course robotics is a tricky field, and producing a fleet of these machines reliable enough to be cost effective has proven to be quite a challenge. But on an individual level, turning any drone into one that can deliver a package is not only doable but is something [Iloke-Alusala] demonstrates with their latest project.

The project aims to be able to turn any drone into a delivery drone, in this case using a FPV drone as the platform. Two hitch-like parts are 3D printed, one which adds an attachment point to the drone and another which attaches to the package, allowing the drone to easily pick up the package and then drop it off quickly. The real key to this build is the control mechanism. [Iloke-Alusala] used an ESP32 to tap into the communications between the receiver and the flight controller. When the ESP32 detects a specific signal has been sent to the flight controller, it can activate the mechanism on the 3D printed hitch to either grab on to a package or release it at a certain point.

While this is a long way from a fully autonomous fleet of delivery drones, it goes a long way into showing that individuals can use existing drones to transport useful amounts of material and also sets up a way for an ESP32 to decode and use a common protocol used in drones, making it easy to expand their capabilities in other ways as well. After all, if we have search and rescue drones we could also have drones that deliver help to those stranded.

Continue reading “DIY Drones Deliver The Goods With Printed Release” →

Avian-Inspired Drones: How Studying Birds Of Prey Brings More Efficient Drones Closer

January 15, 2025 by Maya Posch 17 Comments

The EPFL LisRaptor with adjustable wings and tail.

Throughout evolution, the concept of powered flight has evolved and refined itself multiple times across both dinosaurs (birds), mammals (bats) and insects. So why is it that our human-made flying machines are so unlike them? The field of nature-inspired flying drones is a lively one, but one that is filled with challenges. In a recent video on the Ziroth YouTube channel, [Ryan Inis] takes a look at these efforts, in particular those of EPFL, whose recent RAVEN drone we had a look at recently already.

Along with RAVEN, there is also another project (LisRaptor) based on the Northern Goshawk, a bird of prey seen in both Europe and North-America. While RAVEN mostly focused on the near-vertical take-off that smaller birds are capable of, this project studies the interactions between the bird’s wings and tail, and how these enable rapid changes to the bird’s flight trajectory and velocity, while maintaining efficiency.

The video provides a good overview of this project. Where the LisRaptor differs from the animal is in having a rudder and a propeller, but the former should ideally not be necessary. Obviously the kinematics behind controlled flight are not at all easy, and the researchers spent a lot of time running through configurations aided by machine learning to achieve the ideal – and most efficient – wing and tail configuration. As these prototypes progress, they may one day lead to drones that are hard to differentiate from birds and bats.

Continue reading “Avian-Inspired Drones: How Studying Birds Of Prey Brings More Efficient Drones Closer” →

Hackaday Links: January 12, 2025

January 12, 2025 by Dan Maloney 5 Comments

The big news story of the week of course has been the wildfires in California, which as of Saturday have burned over 30,000 acres, destroyed 12,000 structures, caused 150,000 people to evacuate, and killed eleven people. Actually, calling them wildfires underplays the situation a bit because there are places where they’ve clearly become firestorms, burning intensely enough to create their own winds, consuming everything in their path in a horrific positive feedback loop. We’ve even seen fire tornados caught on video. We’ve got quite a few connections to the affected area, both personally and professionally, not least of which are all our Supplyframe colleagues in Pasadena, who are under immediate threat from the Eaton fire. We don’t know many details yet, but we’ve heard that some have lost homes. We’ve also got friends at the Jet Propulsion Labs, which closed a few days ago to all but emergency personnel. The fire doesn’t seem to have made it down the mountain yet, but it’s very close as of Saturday noon.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: January 12, 2025” →

DIYFPV: A New Home For Drone Builders

January 2, 2025 by Tom Nardi 30 Comments

If you’re looking to get into flying first-person view (FPV) remote controlled aircraft, there’s an incredible amount of information available online. Seriously, it’s ridiculous. In fact, between the different forums and the countless YouTube videos out there, it can be difficult to sort through the noise and actually find the information you need.

What if there was one location where FPV folks could look up hardware, compare notes, and maybe even meet up for the occasional flight? That’s the idea behind the recently launched DIYFPV. In its current state the website is a cross between a social media platform, a hardware database, and a tech support forum.

Being able to look up parts to see who has them in stock and for what price is certainly handy, and is likely to become a very valuable resource, especially as users start filling the database with first-hand reviews. There’s no shortage of social media platforms where you can post and chat about FPV, but pairing that with a dedicated tech support section has promise. Especially if the solutions it produces start getting scrapped by show up in search engines.

But the part of DIYFPV that has us the most interested is the interactive builder tool. As explained in the announcement video below, once this feature goes live, it will allow users to pick parts from the database and virtually wire them together. Parts are represented by high-quality illustrations that accurately represent connectors and solder pads, so you won’t be left guessing where you’re supposed to connect what. Schematics can be shared with others to help with troubleshooting or if you want to get feedback.

The potential here is immense. Imagine a function to estimate the mass of the currently selected electronics, or a simulation of how much current it will draw during flight. It’s not clear how far DIYFPV plans on taking this feature, but we’re eager to find out.

Continue reading “DIYFPV: A New Home For Drone Builders” →

Flying Drones That Can Walk And Jump Into The Air: An Idea With Legs?

December 10, 2024 by Maya Posch 13 Comments

When we look at how everyone’s favorite flying dinosaurs get around, we can see that although they use their wings a lot too, their legs are at least as important. Even waddling or hopping about somewhat ungainly on legs is more energy efficient than short flights, and taking off from the ground is helped by jumping into the air with a powerful leap from one’s legs. Based on this reasoning, a team of researchers set out to give flying drones their own bird-inspired legs, with their findings published in Nature (preprint on ArXiv).

The prototype RAVEN (Robotic Avian-inspired Vehicle for multiple ENvironments) drone is capable of hopping, walking, jumping onto an obstacle and jumping for take-off. This allows the drone to get into the optimal position for take-off and store energy in its legs to give it a boost when it takes to the skies. As it turned out, having passive & flexible toes here was essential for stability when waddling around, while jumping tests showed that the RAVEN’s legs provided well over 90% of the required take-off speed.

During take-off experiments the drone was able to jump to an altitude of about 0.4 meters, which allows it to clear ground-based obstacles and makes any kind of ‘runway’ unnecessary. Much like with our avian dinosaur friends the laws of physics dictate that there are strong scaling limits, which is why a raven can use this technique, but a swan or similar still requires a bit of runway instead of jumping elegantly into the air for near-vertical take-off. For smaller flying drones this approach would however absolutely seem to have legs.

Continue reading “Flying Drones That Can Walk And Jump Into The Air: An Idea With Legs?” →