Hasta La Gadget!

Drones like Parrot’s smart quadcopters are slowly becoming popular toys. While they’re not dirt cheap, they’re very stable, easy to pilot and some of them even have cameras or can be fitted with one. But what if you could turn anything into a drone? That’s exactly what Jasper Van Loenen set out to do when he made Drone It Yourself.

Yep, that’s a bicycle rim drone. The kit consists of four propellers driven by ESC motors, four C-clamps, a Bluetooth module, a receiver and an OpenPilot flight controller. All of these parts fit neatly in a custom briefcase, but the resulting drone isn’t always pretty. Actually you know what? These makeshift drones are beyond pretty. Watch the rim, a keyboard and more take flight:

Needs more R. Kelly. Tinkerers can head to Jasper’s website to download the 3D files for the printed parts.

[via Doobybrain]

Don Vitenzo invented a new type of quadcopter that’s sure to stoke the imaginations of kids and perhaps even vehicle makers. It’s called B, and it’s a remote-controlled quadcopter and car in one.

I know what you’re thinking. The answer is no, the wheels don’t tilt to a horizontal level when you command the B to fly. It doesn’t transform or anything and just flies as it is. But that’s all right; less moving parts means its less likely to break down. Speaking of which, Vitenzo designed B to be durable. Its body is made of polycarbonate and its wheel housing and propellers are very flexible.

The B also has a 2,200mAh battery that’s good for up to 15 minutes of rolling and flying. B is also equipped with a 720×1280 camera and it uses microSD cards (up to 32GB) to save video.

Floats like a butterfly, rides like a car. Buzzes like a bee. Peeps like a perv. Okay this is getting out of hand. Pledge at least £125 (~$190 USD) on Kickstarter to get a ready-to-assemble B kit.

[via The Verge]

Back in 2010, our own John Biggs rightly described Parrot’s AR.Drone as ” the coolest thing [he had] seen in a long, long time.” Since then, Parrot has launched the AR.Drone 2.0 and while it’s still a very cool gadget, quadcopters have come a very long way since 2010. Last month, the folks at DJI, who mostly specialize in developing unmanned aerial systems for commercial use, sent me one of their consumer-oriented and GPS-enabled DJI Phantoms to review.

Most quadcopters are aimed at hobbyists and take a good amount of assembly and at least some experience with flying remote-controlled aircraft. The Phantom, which has a list price of $849 but currently retails for about $680, comes mostly pre-assembled and is extremely easy to fly, thanks to its built-in compass and GPS module. Thanks to having GPS built-in, the drone always knows where it is in relation to you. So depending on the mode you are flying in, every input you give will always be interpreted in relation to you and not in relation to where the front of the aircraft is (here’s a video that explains how this works).

The other cool thing about the GPS mode is that the drone can hover in position even if it’s windy. It’ll just auto-correct for the wind, thanks to its built-in autopilot (you probably want to turn this mode off when you are trying to take a video, however, as the constant corrections will show up in your videos).

This autopilot also kicks in if the Phantom loses its connection with your remote control if it flies out of reach or your remote runs out of battery, the drone itself is very low on battery, or because you turn it off to see if the autopilot actually works. Once the failsafe mode kicks in, the drone will simply fly up to 60 feet, fly back to where it first took off and land. I actually tried this and it worked surprisingly well. The drone touched down just about 3 feet from where I launched it. When you spent $700 on the drone and another $300 or so on a GoPro 3 Silver, that’s a nice feature to have.

The Phantom is a clear step up from something like the AR.Drone. Its communication distance is just under 1,000 feet and a maximum horizontal speed of about 32 feet per second and a descent speed of close to 20 feet per second. That’s fast and feels even faster if you are just learning how to fly it.

These specs show that this isn’t just a toy but can actually be used for some pretty impressive aerial photography. Indeed, since the Phantom launched earlier this year, a whole ecosystem has sprung up around it that provides owners with everything from improved propellers to cases and multi-axis camera gimbals. A gimbal, by the way, isn’t a must, but if you want to take really stable videos without the so-called “jello” effect (here’s a pretty extreme example of that), both a gimbal and some well-balanced after-market rotors will surely help.

Here is a video I took with the Phantom and a GoPro 3 White over the weekend:

The Phantom’s battery lasts just under 15 minutes, so you probably want to buy at least a second one, given that the package only includes a single 2,200mAh battery and a charger.

If you decide to get one of these, by the way, make sure you read the instructions and watch this series of videos before you turn it on. The Phantom may look like a toy and is easy to fly, but this is a pretty high-end piece of technology and there are a few things you need to know and do before your first flight.

With the 2013 NAB Show just around the corner, it’s a fair bet that DJI will announce a few new products in the coming days and we’ll make sure to keep a close eye on this company.

No, that is not a message sent from the future by James T. Kirk, warning us to treat the whales nicely. You’re looking at 30 lit quadcopter robots forming a Starfleet insignia in the night sky above London, just because they can.

I don’t care that it is a publicity stunt. This is a great use of robots. The promotional event for the new Trek movie coincided with Saturday night’s Earth Hour, which was meant to encourage people to take one hour and to conserve electricity.

It’s totally okay to use electricity to make robots form a Federation symbol while others save it. I’m cool with that. It was an amazing once in a lifetime geek event. I wish I could have seen this up close and personal, as I’m sure the video doesn’t do it justice.

[via Geekosystem]

A few weeks ago the Crazyflie Nano captured our collective imaginations by winging its way around an open plan office and looking like a cross between a hummingbird and the robotic butterfly that steals things in Dora the Explorer. The tiny quadrotor robot is now available for pre-order for $173 for the multi-sensor version and $143 for a basic version with position sensors. The product should ship in April.

The project is completely open source and requires a soldering iron and some smarts to complete. The $173 version includes an altimeter and magnetometer so you can tell your height and direction. You can control it with a standard gaming joystick connected to a PC. It weighs 19 grams and is about four inches long and wide. It can fly for 7 minutes on one 20 minute charge, which is about on par for most flying toys.

The creators, Marcus Eliasson, Arnaud Taffanel, and Tobias Antonsson, built the project over the past three years while holding down day jobs. They’re already running into the hurdles of Internet popularity. In response to a potential buyer asking about the need for a soldering iron, Antonsson writes:

via Wired