quadcopter

244 Articles

Lift Beer With Quadcopters, Win Prizes

July 6, 2012 by 2 Comments

If you have a quadcopter and are looking for a beer delivery device, HobbyKing is putting on a beerlift competition The rules for the HobbyKing beer lift are pretty simple: lift the most beer with a quad/hex/octo copter and win a HobbyKing gift card.

There are 3 classes: Unlimited, which means a vehicle of any size goes, a 700 class for copters with a motor-to-motor diameter of 700 mm or less, and a Disaster class for the coolest crash.

So far the largest lift is a monsterous 2 meter octocopter by [Muresan Alexandru Camil] capable of lifting just over 47kg. In the 700 class, a bizarre looking 9-rotor copter built by the Whac-A-Mole flying team was able to lift 28kg.

The disaster category, a smaller quad built by [Gabriel Devault] was barely able to lift four cans of Coors Light water, while the current disaster class leader made a few valiant efforts to lift a keg. Protip: if you’re doing a blooper reel, Yakety Sax is definitely the way to go.

Adding A Bomb Bay To A Quadcopter

July 2, 2012 by 24 Comments

The Fourth of July is fast approaching, and what better way to celebrate the independence of your country than by blowing up a small piece of it? [Anzel360] decided to take that line of thought to a whole new level by adding a bomb bay to his quadrocopter.

[Anzel360] recently upgraded his transmitter to a Spektrum DX8, giving him two extra channels on his four-channel quadrotor. After adding a small servo to the quad, it was a simple matter of taping a box to the undercarriage and filling it full of fireworks.

The ammo [Anzel] is using is just a handful of Snappin’ Pops – otherwise known as the lamest firework ever created. We won’t hold that against him, though; a remote ignition system for a few Black Cats mounted on a fancy quadrocopter is just asking for trouble. We do recall a throwable cap gun bomb from our youth, though, that would allow for year-round ammo replenishment…

Bicycle Quadcopter Flies For Dozens Of Seconds

June 26, 2012 by 32 Comments

If you decide to fly into town on this bicycle-powered quadcopter your arms and legs really will be tired. That’s because this athlete had to give it his all to power the rotors through the foot pedals and the hand cranks. You can see just one of the rotors on the right side of the background. Yeah, this thing is big!

You’re looking at the Gamera II, a craft developed by students at the University of Maryland. About a year ago they were showing off the first version of the aircraft. With the passing of the year comes the breaking of world records as a different rider manages to keep it up for 50 seconds in the video after the break. Although the structure is huge (over 100 feet across) the building materials and techniques let it weigh in at only 71 pounds.

It still looks like way to much physical work for us. We’re sticking to the pedal-powered hydrofoil as our dream transport.

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Hackaday Links: June 3, 2012

June 3, 2012 by 30 Comments

When pigs fly…. close enough.

There are too many jokes to be made about this one. It’s a quadcopter made out of a dead cat. [Bert Jansen], the artist behind this, calls him Orville. He died from natural causes, and what better way to remember a feline friend that liked chasing birds?

Refurbishing an Apple ][

That thirty year old computer in your parent’s attic isn’t going to clean itself, is it? [Todd] put up a series of videos tearing down a 1982 Apple ][ plus, cleaning everything along the way, and doing a very nice demo of AppleSoft BASIC. This is where the revolution started, people.

Ohm sweet Ωhm

Cross stitch isn’t for grandmothers anymore. Adafruit put up a cross stitch tutorial to go along with their resistor color code cross stitch kit. Now down to Hobby Lobby to find black cross stitch cloth and make the ‘ol skull ‘n wrenches.

Welcome! To the world of yesterday!

Boing Boing found an amazing cyberpunk photo spread that appeared in the Mondo 2000 ‘zine back around 1992 or 1993. Even when keeping in mind that this is a self-parody, it’s still incredible. Hackers have laser pointers? And pagers?

Making Arduino projects smaller

[Scott] caught wind of a way to shrinkify Arduino projects, so he turned an Arduino protoboard into an ATtiny85 programmer. As a neat bonus, [Scott] can use the attached breadboard to build circuits around the ’85.

 

Yet Another PCB Quadcopter

June 1, 2012 by 7 Comments

Like most people out there, we’re fascinated by these little buzzing and hovering quadrotors. We’ve really enjoyed the recent trend of miniaturizing them and using PCBs as the frame itself. As [scolton] points out in his instructible, his isn’t the first, the smallest, or the lightest, but he does have some great information and a few tricks up his sleeve that make this a fun project to check out. The 4pcb measures 6.5 inches from motor shaft to motor shaft diagonally. It weighs 138 grams and, with its current batteries,can fly for roughly 8 minutes.

A nice thing about the 4pcb is that it includes brushless motor drivers into the design. Apparently that isn’t very common. What we really like though is the massive amount of reference material [scolton] provides. Not only could you download everything necessary to recreate his work, he links to so many other projects and resources you could probably expand in any direction your heart desires. If you’re considering a quadcopter build in the near future, you might want to bookmark this one.

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Fancy Telemetry Control Display For A Quadcopter

May 7, 2012 by 12 Comments

Most of the quadcopter projects that we’ve seen use a joystick-based control system. This lets you fly the thing around like any RC vehicle. But [Saulius] is augmenting his control system by pulling and displaying telemetry data. It doesn’t really change the way the vehicle is controller, but it lets the craft roam much further away because the operator can watch the computer screen and forego the need for the quadcopter to be within sight.

A Carambola board (also used in this weather station project) is used to provide connectivity. This is WiFi based, which helps us understand the range it can travel. The quadcopter carries a camera, which is shown in the lower right box of the image above. There is also an artificial horizon, and feedback dials which display the telemetry data.

It looks like there’s a satellite view in between those two dashboard widgets. We don’t see anything coming up right now, but it’s possible this is meant to overlay a virtual marker for the aircraft’s position based on GPS data. That last part is really just conjecture though. Catch the 80-second test flight after the jump.

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Giant Pink Hexacopter Is Slightly Safer Than The Rest

May 2, 2012 by 11 Comments

Check out this giant pink hexacopter.  We see tons of quad copters here, but their bigger brothers/sisters the hexacopters don’t visit very often. When they do though, they get all dressed up as you can see in the picture above. This prototype frame is meant to protect both the props, and the innocent bystanders as you inevitably veer into something you shouldn’t.  The frame is constructed mainly from carbon fiber and adds a total of about 1 Kg of weight to the copter. While it does fly, [AirvewLive] is looking for guidance on what prop/motor combo would yield more endurance. Anyone have some recommendations?

We know some of you will notice pretty quickly that he refers to this as a “ducted fan”. We realize it isn’t and we’ll forgive him this once because his build is so cool.

[thanks for the tip Mike]