Wyvern quadcopter

May 3, 2010 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

[William Etter] and his classmates built a quadcopter as a class project. We love the details of these builds and they came through with some thorough documentation. Some highlights that we enjoyed were reading about ABS body design and construction, their analysis of two versus three blade propellers, and their breadboarded control mechanism. You can see their success in the most recent post, but we all know that trial and error plays a role in these builds so we’re glad they’ve shared a collection of crashes with us.

Can’t get enough of this four-rotor action? Check out this project of a similar design.

AeroQuad – Build Your Own Quadcopter

January 15, 2010 by Mike Szczys 58 Comments

It hurts us to look at this quadcopter, agonizingly so when we watch the video after the break. That’s because we feel the unstoppable compulsion to build one. This four-rotor helicopter has a lot to be proud of; it features Gyro stabilization, Xbee remote control for very long distance operation, and computer interface for data graphing and calibration.

We like the quadcopter that we came across at CES but building one of our own is more fun than buying it ready-made. The pain we’re feeling is mostly in our pocketbook. To help ease the agony we scoured the parts list and the assembly instructions in order to get an estimate of what this might cost. We’re looking at around $415 plus shipping, not including transmitter and receiver for controlling it. Yep, that’s a sharp stabbing pain but we’re not sure we can just let it go.

Continue reading “AeroQuad – Build Your Own Quadcopter” →

CES: Parrot AR Drone Update

January 8, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 8 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bL9nCShB9Ac]

Here’s a small update on the AR Drone from Parrot. We finally got this video uploaded. It isn’t anything fantastic, but you get a good view of the board on the bottom of the device. You can clearly see a tiny camera in the middle and what looks like sonar range finders toward the front of the drone.

As some commenters have stated, this looks like a more robust platform of the X-UFO. We haven’t seen the X-UFO, but the salesperson even mentioned it. Check out some flight video after the break. We’ve shot some flight video of our own that we’ll have up soon. Continue reading “CES: Parrot AR Drone Update” →

25C3 Hardware Workshops

December 7, 2008 by Eliot 7 Comments

quadcopter

The 25C3 team has a post highlighting some of the hardware workshops that will be happening at Chaos Communication Congress this year. Our own [Jimmie Rodgers] will be in the microcontroller workshop area building kits with many others. The folks from mignon will be bringing several of their game kits for another workshop. We saw quite a few quadcopters at CCCamp and the team from Mikrokopter will be back to help you construct your own drone. They say it only takes five hours for the full build, but space is limited.

Autonomous Hovering Drones Invade Germany

October 1, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

We welcome the swarm of autonomous hovering robot overlords being made by students at Humboldt University. The goal of this project is to build an autonomous hovering platform that is controlled via adapted insect behavior. Navigation comes from monitoring real time inputs, such as air pressure and optical sensors, not by predefined paths and GPS coordinates. Some examples of this adapted behavior are: navigation via polarized sun light like African ants, and optical flow similar to bees.

You can see the platforms in action on Spiegel Online, but unless you understand German, you won’t get much else out of it.

If any of this seems familiar, it’s because we covered CCCamp 2007, which was near Berlin and had some very similar quadcopters. While the large quadcopter platforms have been around for a while and are steadily coming down in price, there are some new alternatives out there that are quite tempting. Anyone want to build some autonomy into this little baby?

[thanks fh]

Flying RC Penis Violates Chessmaster’s Airspace

May 19, 2008 by Sean Percival 30 Comments

A speech by famed chess player Garry Kasparov was interrupted Saturday by a remote controlled flying penis. Since many of you are at work or school we’ll leave all the pictures, videos, and tasteless jokes after the break.