Little FPV Bot Keeps It Simple With An ESP32

February 11, 2019 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

When it comes to robots, it seems the trend is to make them as complicated as possible – look at anything from Boston Dynamics if you’ve any doubt of that. But there’s plenty to be said for simple robots too, such as this adorable ESP32-driven live-streaming bot.

Now it’s true that [Max.K]’s creation is more remote controlled car than robot, and comparing it to one of the nightmare-fuelling creations of Boston Dynamics is perhaps unfair. But [Max.K]’s new project is itself a simplification and reimagining of his earlier, larger “ZeroBot“. As the name implies, ZeroBot was controlled by a Raspberry Pi Zero, an obvious choice for a mobile platform designed to stream FPV video. The ESP32 bot eschews the Pi platform in favor of, well, an ESP32. To save as much space as possible, [Max.K] did a custom PCB for the microcontroller and its supporting components. The 3D-printed case is nicely designed to hold the board along with two motors, a small VGA camera, and a battery pack. At 160×120 resolution, the video isn’t amazing, but the fact that it can be streamed from the ESP32 at a decent enough framerate to drive the bot using a simple web interface is impressive.

This was a fun project and a very clean, smooth build. We like the lines of this little bot, and wouldn’t mind building one as a quick weekend project ourselves.

Continue reading “Little FPV Bot Keeps It Simple With An ESP32” →

FPV Antenna Leans Into The Bank

December 2, 2018 by Brian Benchoff 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” →

Flying Human Head Lands Just In Time For Halloween

October 9, 2018 by Tom Nardi 15 Comments

We love the fall here at Hackaday. The nights are cooler, the leaves are changing, and our tip line starts lighting up with some of the craziest things we’ve ever seen. Something about terrifying children of all ages just really speaks to the hacker mindset. That sounds bad, but we’re sure there’s a positive message in there someplace if you care to look hard enough.

Today’s abomination is a truly horrifying human head quadcopter, which exists for literally no other reason than to freak people out. We love it. Created by [Josh] and a few friends, the “HeadOCopter” is built around a meticulously detailed 3D print of his own head. This thing is so purpose-built that they didn’t even put landing gear on it: there’s no point sitting on the ground when you’re in the business of terrorizing people from above.

Sure, you could do this project with a cheap plastic skull. But there’s no way it would have the same effect. [Josh] created this monstrosity by scanning his own head with the Microsoft Kinect, cleaning the model up in ZBrush, adding in mounts for hardware, and 3D printing the result. After doing some smoothing and filling, the head got passed off to artist [Lisa Svingos] for the final painting. He even thought to include an FPV camera where one of his eyes should be, giving a whole new meaning to the term.

As for the quadcopter hardware itself, it uses a BrainFPV RADIX flight controller (get it?) and 12×5 props on Sunnysky V3508 motors with 30A BLHELI ESCs. Measuring 1 meter (3.2 feet) from motor to motor, it’s an impressive piece of hardware itself; head or no head.

This project reminds us of the flying ghost we saw years back, but we have to admit, this raises the bar pretty high. We’re almost afraid to see what comes next.

Continue reading “Flying Human Head Lands Just In Time For Halloween” →

Cheap FPV Goggles Turned Pocket Sized Display

September 8, 2018 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

Thanks to the exploding popularity of First Person View (FPV) RC flying over the last couple of years, the cost of the associated hardware has dropped rapidly. Today you can get entry-level FPV goggles for under $40 USD on various import sites. For the money you’re getting a 5.8 GHz receiver, battery, and an LCD display; even if the components themselves aren’t exactly high end, at that price it’s essentially an impulse buy.

[nomand] didn’t necessarily have a use for a cheap FPV headset, but he did like the idea of having a pocket sized display that he could pass off to others so they could see what he’s seeing during flights. So he harvested the principle components from a Eachine VR006 headset and designed a new 3D printed enclosure for them. The final result looks fantastic, and is much cheaper than commercial alternatives on the market.

He’s created an exceptionally detailed step-by-step guide on how you can perform the conversion yourself in the project’s GitHub repository, and has also put together a video where he goes over the modification and discusses the end result. [nomand] clearly intends for this to be a project for others to duplicate instead of a one-off build, and given the price and final results, we wouldn’t be surprised if this conversion becomes popular in FPV circles.

Perhaps the best part of this project is that it requires almost no modification of the original hardware; just soldering two wires because the original connector is too large. Otherwise just need to take the headset apart carefully, and transplant the components into the 3D-printed case [nomand] has meticulously designed. The case is so well designed it doesn’t even need any fasteners, it slides together and everything is held in with some strategically placed pieces of foam.

Between this modification and the custom built spectator display we covered recently, it looks like there’s a clear demand for sub-$50 portable FPV monitors. Seems odd that no manufacture is trying to fill this niche so far.

Continue reading “Cheap FPV Goggles Turned Pocket Sized Display” →

A Custom Built FPV Monitor To Keep The Fans Happy

September 5, 2018 by Tom Nardi 7 Comments

If you’re going to be flying around a FPV-capable aircraft, be it a quadcopter or a fixed-wing plane, you shouldn’t be surprised if bystanders want to take a turn wearing your googles. Of course we hope that you’re good enough flying line of sight that you don’t need to be wearing the googles to stay airborne, but it does make it harder to pull off the sort of tricks and maneuvers that your audience wants to see. So if you want to put on a good show, the audience really needs their own display.

Unfortunately, as avid FPV flier [Michael Delaney] discovered, even the “cheap” ones will run you at least $100 USD. So he did what any self-respecting hacker would do, he set out to build his own. Using a collection of off the shelf components he was able to build a very impressive monitor that lets the viewer see through the eyes of his quadcopter at less than half the cost of commercially available offerings. Though even if he hadn’t manged to beat the cost of a turn-key monitor, we think it would have been more than worth it for this piece of highly customized gear.

At the heart of the monitor is a Boscam RX5808 5.8 GHz receiver, which is controlled by an Arduino Pro Mini. The video output from the receiver is sent to a 4.2″ TFT screen intended for the Raspberry Pi, and on the backside of the laser-cut wooden enclosure there’s a 128 x 64 I2C OLED to display the currently selected channel and diagnostic information.

An especially nice touch for this project is the custom PCB used to tie all the components together. [Michael] could have taken the easy route and sent the design out for fabrication, but instead went with the traditional method of etching his own board in acid. Though he did modernize the process a bit by using a laser and pre-sensitized copper clad board, a method that seems to be gaining in popularity as laser engravers become a more common component of the hacker’s arsenal.

We’ve previously covered using the RX5808 and Arduino combo to create a spectrum analyzer, in case you want to do more than just watch your friends do powerloops.

Remote Controlled Electric Snowblower Sports FPV For Safety

August 7, 2018 by Dan Maloney 27 Comments

As summer scorches the northern hemisphere, here’s something to cool your thoughts: winter is only four months away. And with it will come the general misery and the proclamations that “It’ll never be warm again,” not to mention the white stuff and the shoveling. Or perhaps not, if you’re lucky enough to have a semi-autonomous electric snowblower in the garage.

The device [Dane Kouttron] describes is a strange beast indeed, and one that came to him under somewhat mysterious circumstances. It appears to be a standard Ariens two-stage blower, the kind normally driven by a fairly beefy internal combustion engine so as to have enough power to run the auger, the impeller, and the drive wheels. But a previous owner had removed the gas engine and attached a 4-kW brushless motor to run the auger and impeller. Realizing the potential of this machine and with a winter storm heading his way, [Dane] used the old engine mount to hold giant LiFePO₄ batteries from a cell tower backup battery, slapped a couple of electric wheelchair motors onto the drive wheels, mounted a motor to swivel the exhaust chute, and added control electronics from a retired battlebot. Setting such a machine loose in the wild would be bad, so an FPV system was added just in time for storm cleanup. Upgrades for version 2 include better weight distribution for improved stability and traction, and of course googly eyes. Check out the video below to see it flinging snow and moving around faster than any snowblower we’ve ever seen.

We’ll never get lucky enough to have such wonders gifted on us as [Dane] did, but we applaud him for picking up the torch where someone else obviously left off. And who knows; perhaps the previous maker took inspiration from this remote-controlled snowblower build?

Continue reading “Remote Controlled Electric Snowblower Sports FPV For Safety” →

A Mobile Computer To Make William Gibson Jealous

July 28, 2018 by Tom Nardi 21 Comments

The personal computers in science fiction books, movies, and games are way cooler than the dinky pieces of hardware we’re stuck with in the real world. Granted the modern laptop has a bit more style than the beige boxes of yesteryear, but they still aren’t half as l33t as the custom PowerBooks in Hackers. Luckily for those who dream of jacking into the Matrix, the average hacker now has access to the technology required to make a custom computer to whatever fanciful specifications they wish.

A perfect example is this “cyberdeck” created by [Tinfoil_Haberdashery]. Inspired by William Gibson’s Neuromancer, this wild-looking machine is more than just a cosplay prop or conversation piece. It packs in enough power to be a daily-driver computer, as well as some special features which make it well suited for field work.

The body of the cyberdeck is 3D printed, but as [Tinfoil_Haberdashery] doesn’t have a 3D printer big enough to do the whole thing in one piece he had to break it up into subsections. He added a dovetail pattern to the edges of each piece, which makes for much stronger joint than simply gluing it together. A worthwhile tip if you ever find yourself in need of printing something really big.

Raspberry Pi aficionados might be disappointed to see the Intel NUC motherboard inside; which features a 3.4 Ghz dual-core CPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a roomy 500 GB SSD in an incredibly small package. To keep everything running the machine can take up to twelve 18650 cells, giving it a maximum run-time of sixteen hours or so. There’s even a 12 V power jack so he can power a soldering iron and other low voltage gadgets off of the deck’s batteries in a pinch. The integrated charger can take anywhere from 6 to 30 V, which gives [Tinfoil_Haberdashery] the ability to charge up from a wide array of sources.

But perhaps the best feature of the cyberdeck is the display. It uses a Fat Shark Transformer, a five inch 720p display designed for FPV drone use, which can not only fold flat against the deck for storage, but can be removed and slipped into a pair of goggles. This gives the cyberdeck a head mounted display that looks like something straight out of the movies. It even supports 3D, if you’re willing to cut the resolution in half.

Things have come a long way in the world of DIY head mounted computer displays. Really makes you wonder what the dedicated hacker is going to be able to pull off in another 10 years or so.

[via /r/cyberpunk]