I’d like to report here some details of my last personal drone build, a mini quadcopter for First Person View (FPV) flight.
Weight: 360 gr w/o battery. With 2200 mA 2S battery: 487 gr.
Size: The 4 motor centers form a square with a side of 17,5 cm and a diagonal distance from front motor to back motor of 25 cm. So the quad is in the 250 class. Continue reading Building a mini quadcopter for FPV
The Senate of the state of Hawaii issued a bill for an act that would severely restricts the possibility to use drone for taking aerial pictures or video.
The main concern seems to be related to the protection of Hawaii citizens privacy. The title of the document is “Unmanned Aircrafts; Right to Privacy“. Using drones for video application would be restricted to just a few selected cases.
“Use of unmanned aircrafts prohibited. Except as provided under this part, it shall be unlawful for any law enforcement agency, state or local public agency, person, or entity to use an unmanned aircraft to gather information, including but not limited to images, photographs, or recordings.” Continue reading The Senate of the State of Hawaii issues a bill that would severely restrict drone photography and videography
According to this article on Franceinfo, a young french entrepreneur, 18 yr old Thomas Nans, is being prosecuted for “endangering other people lives” after taking an aerial video of the city of Nancy with one of his multirotors.
Here’s the video, great stuff:
Thomas Nans was called to appear in Nancy court for this accusation.
The Hubsan H107D FPV is quite close to my ideal personal drone: small, with embedded video transmitter and camera and good flying performance.
At least some channels ar compatible with FatShark equipment, so it is possible to fly it FPV with just a pair of FatShark goggles. It is also possible to fly it FPV right from the hubsan radio, which comes with a generous screen that gets the video feed live.
Well, it’s not the Black Hornet PD-100, no GPS, no 20+ minutes flight time, video range limited to 100 meters or so according to manufacturer. However for the price (150-250$ depending on the source), it is just an amazing little personal drone. Continue reading Wide angle mod for Hubsan 4x H107D FPV – For a better FPV experience
Picture this. You are trapped with your car in a long line of traffic and have no idea about how long the line is, if there is an accident ahead and how far.
Unless you have one of those:
you have no real way to escape the line. Would be great though, to be able to figure out what’s ahead. Continue reading Renault Kwid: a new concept car with embedded quadcopter
The Black Knight Transformer seems to come right out of a science fiction movie. Those scenarios of cities from the future filled with flying vehicles might be a step closer.
See the Black Knight in action in this video on youtube:
And the official press release:
EL SEGUNDO, California, 8 January 2014 – Advanced Tactics Inc., a small aerospace company, released details about its AT Transformer vehicle technology and announced that a full-scale technology demonstrator has completed its first driving tests.
Continue reading Peeking into our future – The Black Knight Transformer multirotor manned Vehicle