If there’s one thing you can count on [Peter Sripol] for, it’s for defining the the aviation category of “Don’t Try This At Home.” In the video below the break, [Peter] displays his latest terror of the skies: A powered paraglider backpack that has fifty electric motors. Does it fly? Yes. Was it a success? Eh… mostly.

As [Peter] even says in the video: Don’t try this at home. [Peter] has taken a paraglider, which is essentially a non-rigid fabric wing that to the untrained eye resembles a parachute, and powered it with fifty drone motors taken from other projects. Two motors each are mounted in a push/pull configuration inside a 5×5 array of 3d printed ducts.

While the experiment was essentially a success, it was also a failure due to not having enough power, too little battery life, and overall just not being that great. Does every experiment need to end in absolute success in order to have fun and learn lessons that can be applied to the next iteration? Definitely not! We applaud [Peter] for being willing to fail- although, we have to admit, failing is a lot easier when you’ve already got a parachute of sorts deployed!

Looking for some more don’t-try-this-at-home projects to gawk at? Look no further than [Colin Furze] who like [Peter],  has managed to gain his own Hackaday tag.

Continue reading “Fifty Motored Paraglider Partly Flies, Partly Glides” →

Peter Sripol really likes building gravity defying death traps. He recently flew the fourth ultralight, which he designed and built himself. For a taste of what’s going on here, the wings have aluminum tube spars and are made of hot-wire-cut styrofoam sections.

To keep the plane simple, he got rid of ailerons entirely. For roll stabilization he angled up the wings noticeably, adding dihedral. This gives the aircraft passive stability, because as it rolls to a side, the upper wing’s lift decreases and the lower wing’s lift increases, forcing the plane to correct itself. Interestingly he kept the rudder controls on pedals instead of moving it to the stick, so the stick only controls the elevator.

It is powered by a single large brushless electric motor borrowed from the OpenPPG project. On the first test he used a two-bladed propeller, with a small pitch angle which required full throttle to keep flying. It can be compared to driving a car only in first gear. By moving to a three bladed propeller with a higher pitch angle, and increasing the length of the wings for more lift, [Peter] was able to cruise comfortably at about 30 MPH or 48 km/h.

Although this aircraft definitely performed better than [Peter]’s previous ultralight builds, piloting something like this isn’t for the faint of heart. Although he does extensive weight-loading and thrust testing before taking to the air, adding tail weight to piloted aircraft by simply taping a water bottle to the tail just felt wrong. But we aren’t aviation experts, so we won’t pass final judgement.