Alton Porter had a great idea for the best use of his personal drone during halloween.
Can’t miss this movie, here you go:
Hobbyking’s Integrated PCB Micro Quad PNP with kk2.0 flight controller setup (success!)
As a follow up to the previous post on
Advances in setting up Hobbyking’s Integrated PCB Micro Quad PNP with kk2.0 flight controller
Great news: propellers from hobbyking arrived today, so I was able to complete the setup. Trimming correctly was a bit tricky, but I think I got quite right. It is a bit unstable on take off but then catches up quickly as it gains some height.
The default landing gear seem to be expressly designed to have the quad tilt on landing and arms crash on the floor, as it provides a very narrow base. Hence the ping pong balls mod.
Here you go:
Edit: Moved the ping pong balls more toward the center, as right under the motors is not a good place to avoid stress to the “weak spot”. Also added a mobius camera to check for video stability and as a first step toward an FPV setup. A soft sponge ball was zip tied to each arm, and covered with tape for additional arms protection.
In Marseille police plans to use drones for law enforcement and surveillance purposes
Marseille Police chief Jen-Paul Bonnetain is pushing the idea of using drone based aerial surveillance to aid law enforcement and police investigations. The idea is strongly supported by socialist politician Eugène Castelli, who is ready to propose investments for millions of euros in the project.
Will Marseille become a test ground for a wider aerial surveillance program in France? Are we entering a science fiction era in which multicopters and personal, or less personal drones will be part of our everyday life?
Source: Le Monde
Team Black Sheep videos
Team Black Sheep earned a reputation for their amazing videos in urban environments in cities all over the world, mostly taken either with their TBS Discovery FPV quadcopter:
or with their wing called “the caipirinha”:
I found a video on Venice taken with the Discovery that is just outstanding, thought I would share it here. Here you go:
And a couple more…
This is a more recent one in Thailand, taken with the caipirinha:
Enjoy!
Pilot of the phantom quadcopter that crashed in Manhattan arrested
We recently reported about the story in which a phantom quadcopter was flown over manhattan, went out of control and landed at the feets of a worried businessman, who handled the little personal drone, with camera and sd card, to the police and ABC News. This is the original story from ABC news:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J71QG1WqWw
These is an important update on this story as 34 years old Brooklin musician David Zablidowsky was arrested for reckless endangerment, a class A misdemeanor, for “flying a remote control helicopter off a balcony, losing control, causing it to crash to the ground from an unreasonable height creating a substantial risk of serious physical injury.”
This puts flying a personal drone over a populated area in a different perspective for people with this hobby. At the time, police said that “no laws were broken” and it looked like they were not going to pursue the investigations further. Eventually, somebody understood that the phenomena of personal rc drones will probably grow exponentially in the next years and something had to be done to “send the right message”.
You can read the story and watch a video here.
Here’s the original footage from the phantom:
Multirotor uav based books (and pizza) delivery services
An aerial, unmanned books delivery service might soon start in Australia. Flirtey, a tech statup born in Sidney University might well extend the plan to delivery of other good such as food and drink in the future.
The Flirtey website states that they are building an industry, not a company. At such an early stage of this technology, with so many still unexplored potential applications this might well be true.
Read the story here and here and watch the video:
Similar services are also under experimentation in the US, where Dominos plans to deliver pizza by a special multirotor called, you guessed it, the domicopter. However this one might be more an advertisement move that something that will really happen (in a near future). Here you go with unmanned pizza delivery from Dominos:
RCtimer 450 quadcopter build with kk2 board
Those are a few details of my latest project
– RC Timer 459 quadcopter frame and arms
– KK2.0 control board flashed to firmware 1.6
– Alware carbon mount for add ons, nicely protects the board and receiver. For now occupied by the “pilot”
– RC Timer 30A ESCs
– DJI 950K motors
– Hobbyking battery monitor
– Red flashing leds on back arms
– Leds for front arms in progress
The new personal drone flies, it works! Stay tuned for videos!
Personal drones parenting: kid tracking drone
Tech inclined father Paul Wallich has built a personal drone to follow, everyday, his kid to the bus stop. The quadcopter (or childcopter) follows a GPS tracker that the kid alway carry along on the way to school.
Story and tech details
Athletic flying machines
Amazing presentation by Raffaello D’Andrea, Professor of Dynamics Systems and Control at the Zurich ETH. Prof. D’andrea demonstrates the amazing skills that can be conferred to quadcopters by developing and applying the correct mathematical algorithms.
Here’s the video:
Raffaello D’andrea interviewed by Rolf Dobelli, talks about some of his ongoing projects:
Animal liberation front uses 17000$ drone to spy (lawfully) on farms
The animal liberation front in Australia uses a big octocopter to gather information and evidence on the treatment of animals in farms, to be passed to authorities. The operation of drones on private land appears to be fully lawful.
Here the story and the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAXX1VxW3iQ
Update 7/1/2014
Looks like the Animal Liberation Front has many “supporters”. Here’s what the youtube page shows now.
“The account was terminated due to multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement”
