Remote Control FPV Cockpit

November 7, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

cockpit

FPV flying, for how awesome it actually is, still consists of fiddling around with a remote control transmitter and either wearing video goggles or squinting into a screen. Awesome, yes, but not as cool as [Brett Hays]’s enclosed cockpit ground station. It’s a trailerable flight sim that allows you to have the same experience of flying an aircraft over your local terrain without actually leaving the ground.

The centerpiece for this build is a 42 inch flat screen TV that was picked up for $160. This was placed at the front of a large plywood and 2×2 box along with a computer joystick, throttle, and rudder controls.

The pots inside the controls needed to be switched out to match the resistance of the ones inside an old Futaba transmitter. From there, completing the the cockpit was just a matter of fabricating a few panels for a video switcher, gear retract lever, flaps. and RC radio settings.

It’s a truly amazing build and when placed on a trailer towed by [Brett]’s jeep, has the potential to be the closest thing to flying a manned aircraft you can get without a pilot’s license.

Videos of the cockpit in action below.

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DIY Mini Quadcopter Frame Is Light And Strong

October 28, 2013 by Adam Fabio 7 Comments

quadcopter-frame

[Oscar] has been busy lately building DIY mini quadcopters. We saw his controller design earlier in the month. Back then he was using it with his walking robot designs. Now [Oscar] has posted up some information on his quadcopter work. Even though [Oscar] is new to mini quads, he began by designing his own frame. He started his frame design by using a cut down version of the well-known 949 frame. [Oscar] chose polystyrene for his motor mounts, which turned out to be the downfall of the frame. Polystyrene proved to be much too flimsy to handle the vibrations of the motors and props. The vibrations were transmitted to the accelerometers, which resulted in a model that was very hard to control. You can see this in the first video after the break.

For his second attempt, [Oscar] started with a proven design from HobbyKing. HobbyKing’s fiberglass mini quadcopter frame is sturdy, but heavy, and expensive to replace (If the parts are even in stock). The frame did work though, so he used it as a starting point for his second DIY frame. The new frame is based upon fiberglass shafts. [Oscar] used hot glue to join the shafts to the motor mounts. Each joint was wrapped in string, which was then coated with hot glue. We’d suggest thin cyanoacrylate glue in the future for these types of joints. Only a few drops of CA soaks up into the string, creating an extremely light and strong joint. [Oscar’s] frame ended up at about half the weight of the HobbyKing frame, but was stiff enough for a successful flight test, as can be seen in the second video after the break.

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Heavy Lifting Copters Can Apparently Lift People

September 20, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 32 Comments

Online RC store Hobby King is once again encouraging people to push the limits of what quadcopters and other multirotor remote control vehicles can do. They call it the beerlift and the goal is simple: build a multirotor craft capable of carrying the greatest amount of beer (or water, everything is measured by weight).

The competition is over, but the results were spectacular. The vehicle with the largest lift capacity – pictured above – was built by [Olaf Frommann] and carried 58.7 kilograms, or nearly 128 pounds to a hover a few feet off the ground. Last year the biggest lift was a mere 47 kg with an eight-rotor craft.

It was still an impressive showing all around. The biggest lift in the 700 class – 700 mm from rotor to rotor – was done by [David Ditch] with 19.6 kg. You can check out some of the best entries below, including an amazing aerobatic quadcopter that can successfully loop carrying a cup of beer,

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An Absurdly Small Tri-copter

August 24, 2013 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

The team behind the Femtoduino – an extraordinarily small repackaging of the Arduino – sent in a few videos from YouTuber [phineasIV], a.k.a. [Eric] that shows one of the smallest multicopters we’ve ever seen.

Because this isn’t a traditional quad or hexcopter, the control system is a little weird. Two of the motors and props are fixed along the vertical axis, while the rear prop is connected to a small servo to rotate from side to side. Still, the electronics are fairly standard for any multi rotor vehicle – a triple-axis gyro provides the stability of the vehicle coupled with MultiWii, while an amazingly small servo receiver, Bluetooth module,, Femtoduino, and a trio of brushless ESCs tie everything together.

The end result is a tri-copter that weighs about the same as the Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter, but is just a bit smaller. As impressive as it is on video (seen below), we’d love to see this tiny robotic hummingbird in person.

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Crazyflie Control With Leap And Kinect

August 22, 2013 by Marsh 9 Comments

crazieFlie03

The gang at Bitcraze is at it again, this time developing Leap Motion control for their Crazyflie quadcopter, as well as releasing a Kinect-driven autopilot proof of concept. If you haven’t seen the Crazyflie before, you may not realize how compact it is: 90mm motor to motor and only 19 grams.

As far as we can tell, the Crazyflie still needs a PC to control it, so the Leap and Kinect are natural followups. Hand control with the Leap Motion is what you’d expect: just imagine your open palm controlling it like a marionette, with the height of your hand dictating thrust. The Kinect setup looks the most promising. The guys strapped a red ball to the Crazyflie that provides a trackable object against a white backdrop. The Kinect then monitors the quadcopter while a user steers via mouse clicks. Separate PID controllers correct the roll, pitch and thrust to reposition the Crazyflie from its current coordinates to a new setpoint chosen by a click or a drag. Videos of both Leap and Kinect piloting are below.

Tight on cash but still want to take to the skies? We have two rubber-band-powered devices from earlier this week: the Ornithopter and the hilariously brilliant GoPro Slingshot.

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Google Glass Controlled Quadcopter

August 9, 2013 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

google-glass-quadcopter-control

For some reason this project makes us think of the Dog Pog Grid from Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age. It’s not that there’s a ton of drones floating around this guy, it’s that he’s got one which looks like it’s his bodyguard and is controlled by the Google Glass he wears on his head. The future is now!

We find the metamorphosis of this project interesting as well. It started as a Leap motion controlled rover project. We saw a similar hack just the other day that paired a Leap Motion with a Hexapod. But [Blaine] wasn’t satisfied with that. Having had a taste for alternate control inputs he dug in and got to work making Google Glass the control interface. But the problem with moving your head to control a rover is that you can’t actually see it because looking down would cause unwanted motion. His solution was to transition to a quadcopter, which will hover at eye level when he’s looking right at it. Glass is sending raw sensor data to a server, which does the translation to control commands for the quadcopter.

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Hackaday Links: Sunday, August 4th, 2013

August 4, 2013 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

[Craig Turner] shows that simplicity can be surprisingly interesting. He connected up different colors of blinking LEDs in a grid. There’s no controller, but the startup voltage differences between colors make for some neat patterns with zero effort.

Remember the 3D printed gun? How about a 3D printed rifle! [Thanks Anonymous via Reason]

While we’re on the topic of 3D printing, here’s a design to straighten out your filament.

It takes four really big propellers to get an ostrich off the ground. This quadcopter’s a bit too feathery for us, but we still couldn’t stop laughing.

This Kinect sign language translator looks pretty amazing. It puts the Kinect on a motorized gimbal so that it can better follow the signer. We just had a bit of trouble with translation since the sound and text are both in Hebrew. This probably should have been a standalone feature otherwise.

Work smarter, not harder with this internal combustion wheelbarrow. [via Adafruit]