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Tiny, Hackable Quadcopter Drone Launches Pre-Orders
- jug6ernaut 14y agoVery cool. Though the 7 minute flight time is rather disappointing. I know this would increase costs a LOT but it would be awesome if it could be redesigned to use smaller chips and put more of the weight to the battery. On that can anyone explain to me why they positioned the batter on the top of the device? Wouldn't it be better balanced to have placed it below the body? Not that stability looked like an issue just seems like an odd design choice.
- AhtiK 14y agoA military grade droid nano copter can fly for 25 minutes so hopefully these kind of technologies will soon come to consumer market. http://www.proxdynamics.com/products/pd_100_prs/ http://www.proxdynamics.com/products/pd_100_prs/ That model is rather crazy across the whole spec: 16g, outdoor, max speed 10m/s, 25min flight time, steerable camera, just unbelievable.
- jlgreco 14y ago7 minute flight time is a bit short, but on the other hand the charge time is only 20 minutes. I think I might get one and try to make some sort of induction charging / IR base-station seeking setup, like a roomba. Probably makes the most sense to put the IR beacon on the chopper and have a webcam in the base-station guide it back for charging.
- tlrobinson 14y agoThen if you have at least 4 of them you could have unlimited flight time, if they stay close to their charging stations.
- jlgreco 14y agoYup, for values of "close" that are 3.5 minutes away, which seems pretty far considering how fast those things seem to move. I imagine the real limit will be radio range (you might be able to use some inertial guidance to get the device back into the general area to be able to pick up the IR beacon).
- Florin_Andrei 14y ago> Very cool. Though the 7 minute flight time is rather disappointing. It's pretty standard for any electric copter these days. It's a simple matter of energy density. If you go on hobbyking.com and build a standard-size quad from parts, you won't get much more flight time than that. Somewhat better, sure, but not a whole lot. This is reason #387 why we need a revolution in energy storage.
- bri3d 14y agoI get 13 minutes out of a 3300mAh 3S Turnigy "nano-tech." 10x4.5 props, 1100kv motors. My payload capacity isn't particularly high but a GoPro sans case is only just over 90 grams, so it works fine. I do agree that we're reliant on advancements in energy storage to push the flight time envelope, but improving even nearly twofold on 7 minutes isn't particularly difficult.
- Florin_Andrei 14y agoSo how about this: http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1666155 http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1666155 Very simple chassis, Depron and some wood sticks. 1500kv motors. 5x3 props. Turnigy nano-tech battery, but with a choice of two models: 1. Either 1000 mAh weighing 79g 2. Or 1400 mAh weighing 119g. Which battery would you choose?
- ChuckMcM 14y agoThey are doing this through Seeedstudios (the number of 'e's is important!) who, when I was with Google, we did a group buy of their digital oscilloscope kits. It turned out quite well so I wasn't worried about pre-ordering through them. Now to think up some exceptionally opsish type thing to do with them, there is data center re-con of course but I was thinking like "go sit on the bad top of rack switch and blink your LED" kinds of things.
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- stephengillie 14y agoThis device has an onboard camera and a decent microcontroller (32 bit MCU @ 72 MHz (128kb flash, 20kb RAM)). This is just begging to have OpenCV running on it.
- iliis 14y agoSadly no camera per default, but you can 'easily' add one yourself.
- joshmlewis 14y agoI wish I was a programmer so I could build one and just fly it around. I know that's not the purpose and it specifically says it's not for toying around, but with a camera I think this is really cool. Who wants to make one for me for an additional cost? :)
- stephengillie 14y agoHumans learn by playing. They're wrong about it "not being for toying around".
- yk 14y agoSoldering is not that hard to learn ( and usually one finds the grip side of a soldering iron in two or three tries). So dimidium facti qui coepit habet: sapere aude, incipe
- newbie12 14y agoFor $300 you can buy the awesome AR Parrot Drone 2.0, which has a video camera, about twice the flying time, and runs through your smart phone.
- IheartApplesDix 14y agowhy is the propeller chassis made from circuit board? Isn't that kind of an expensive and fragile solution?
- TomNomNom 14y agoI assume it's mostly to keep weight down. I imagine it could also make manufacture easier/cheaper; you'd need most of the board for the circuitry anyway, so why spend more money a separate piece for the chassis? Also: I don't know if you've ever tried to break or cut a circuit board but it's pretty tough stuff for its weight too.
- jlgreco 14y agoYeah, worse case you could make an extended wire bumper that protects the top/bottom of the device: http://www.bitcraze.se/2012/10/protective-frame-prototype/ http://www.bitcraze.se/2012/10/protective-frame-prototype/
- ansible 14y agoCircuit boards are fiberglass and copper. They are not too bad as structural components. Especially for something this light. The main issue is that you don't want your board flexing on any regular basis, because that will cause the solder joints to crack. Again, the low mass really helps.
- Florin_Andrei 14y agoCB is actually a pretty tough material. It's a type of fiberglass after all, or a composite material anyway. Very hard to break, speaking from years of working with it. Since you need electric circuits anyway, and a material that's not heavy but sturdy, you could stomp two birds with one stone and use CB instead. It's a pretty popular solution among those who build small quads.
- pm90 14y agoThis is brilliant. I can't stop wondering how this will make espionage much more easy. Or even stalking. Then, we will have a slew of companies that guarantee 'security from aerial surveillance'. I'm sure they'll make a killing.
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- uptown 14y agoHow about dropping things over prison walls? Seems like it'd be pretty easy with these types of devices.
- zalzane 14y agohow about scaling one up and making it deliver pizzas?
- TheCondor 14y agoThey look like remarkably fun toys but I agree with you, TMZ and the paparazzi media will be who really pushes this stuff to the next level. At least that's how the world looks to me.
- sosuke 14y agoMy first thought is to make Quadcopter obstacle courses for group racing. Combine that with augmented reality power-ups that you could use to freeze an opponent and we have a Mario Kart Racing style game.
- stephengillie 14y agoWould you allow automated competitors? Who's faster at learning the course, the twitchy redbull'd racer, or the fast-prototyping hacker?
- sosuke 14y agoBoth! We would have the human class and script class competitions and then a FFA class. I like this idea more and more.
- syassami 14y agoIt would be cool to keep the racers on a set path (like a floating road) with a certain boundary so they would not deviate too far from the width of the imaginary path, and have the pilots fly within it to make it a more "closer" race
- sopooneo 14y agoI've thought about that too. If you could get the signals to penetrate, racing through the woods with first person view would be agonizingly close to actually riding a speeder bike on Endor.
- nona 14y agoRight now it's vapour, but there's also this: http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/products/mecam.htm http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/products/mecam.htm It promises better hardware (Cortex-A9 SoC, 1.0-1.5GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, SD card, 2.4GHz/5GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), at a third of the price (MSRP: $49). But again, it's not real (yet?) - whereas the pre-order of the Crazyflie Nano has at least already started. And they seem to have a firm shipping date.
- cwilson 14y agoThe inductive charging hack is SO freaking awesome. I am going to have a base-station on my desk for it to land on and charge.
- spuz 14y agoIt's a great idea but that big stack of copper coils has got to weigh the copter down and likely reduce the fly time significantly.
- yk 14y agoBut it can reload by itself, so flying time should be increased. ( It would be cool to build something that you can reload the drone in the air. Some kind of Tesla coil for example. :)
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- Florin_Andrei 14y agoA quad copter actually requires a lot of energy to stay aloft. Folks who build regular quads, using 2000 ... 3500 mAh batteries, get something like 10 ... 15 min flight time. That's a lot of energy going down the wind. You might be able to juice it up in midair, but the field would have to be somehow focused on the quad, otherwise you'll never get the required power density.
- yk 14y agoThat would be something in the range of a 20 W at the drone. So something like a modified microwave oven should do it. ( The drone flies into the oven, recharges in flight, flies out when charged.) That has the additional advantage that no 200 W radio emitters are jamming all cell phones in the neighborhood.
- Florin_Andrei 14y ago
- rdl 14y agoI wonder what it will be like in a decade or so looking back on the lovely period where only the US Government had lethal drones, and operated them with relative restraint.
- DannoHung 14y agoOf course you know, this means that the next stage is laser based defense systems. It's gonna be a lot easier to fry something traveling slower than the speed of sound from a few hundred feet away than something travelling at orbital velocities miles away. Too bad about all the dead birds though.
- rdl 14y agoI'm more worried about micro-UAVs and other bugs than I am about the big ones. I assume SCIFs of the future will basically have real airlocks and some comprehensive scanning of people who go in and out.
- jrochkind1 14y ago> I wonder what it will be like in a decade or so looking back on the lovely period where only the US Government had lethal drones, and operated them with relative restraint. You are exactly right. Except of course that the current 'relative restraint' is in the eye of the beholder, and it probably doesn't seem like 'relative restraint' to those living in certain areas of Pakistan. But yeah, soon enough that'll be all of us. We're in for a world of horror. If we were wise, we'd be establishing the idea that military drones are to be prohibited by international treaty and considered a war crime, not normalizing them.
- yk 14y agoA international treaty would probably not work well, since military drones are actually useful for combat. Unlike biological weapons, were the victim has two weeks of incubation period to defeat you, or chemical weapons, which are quite useless against hardened targets. ( And since WWII there was no conflict which came close to the nuclear threshold.) Therefore an AI arms control regime would be a lot harder to construct than a WMD one. Having said that, I am actually not very pessimistic about drones. I think that they are similar to cars, which enable a quick get away for the perpetrators of a crime, but are in fact more dangerous in accidents than as means of a crime. ( And similar, if there are thousands of pizza delivery drones then some of them will fall out of the sky by pure statistics.)
- djb_hackernews 14y agoThis is awesome. If they aren't already working on it they need to build interfaces for mobile devices.
- robkomilan 14y agoThe Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 already does that though the range is absolutely horrid. http://ardrone2.parrot.com/usa/ http://ardrone2.parrot.com/usa/
- boredguy8 14y agoAs these get smaller and smaller, we get closer and closer to a dog pod grid: Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off nowadays. Nanotech materials were stronger. Computers were infinitesimal. Power supplies were much more potent. It was almost difficult not to build things that were lighter than air. . . . Given that it was so easy to make things that would float in air, it was not much of a stretch to add an air turbine. This was nothing more than a small propeller, or series of them, mounted in a tubular foramen wrought through the body of the aerostat, drawing in air at one end and forcing it out the other to generate thrust. A device built with several thrusters pointed along different axes could remain in one position, or indeed navigate through space. Each aerostat in the dog pod grid was a mirror-surfaced, aerodynamic teardrop just wide enough, at its widest part, to have contained a pingpong ball. These pods were programmed to hang in space in a hexagonal grid pattern, about ten centimeters apart near the ground (close enough to stop a dog but not a cat, hence "dog pods") and spaced wider as they got higher. In this fashion a hemi- spherical dome was limned around the sacrosanct airspace of the New Atlantis Clave. When wind gusted, the pods all swung into it like weathervanes, and the grid deformed for a bit as the pods were shoved around; but all of them even- tually worked their way back into place, swimming upstream like minnows, pro- pelling the air turbines. The 'bines made a thin hissing noise, like a razor blade cutting air, that, when multiplied by the number of pods within earshot, engendered a not altogether cheerful ambience. Enough wrestling with the wind, and a pod's battery would run down. Then it would swim over and nuzzle its neighbor. The two would mate in midair, like dragonflies, and the weaker would take power from the stronger. The system included larger aerostats called nurse drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly selected pods all over the grid, which would then distribute it to their neigh- bors. If a pod thought it was having mechanical trouble, it would send out a message, and a fresh pod would fly out from the Royal Security installation be- neath Source Victoria and relieve it so that it could fly home to be decompiled. --Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
- GuiA 14y agoReminds me of one of my graduate classes, which was about designing distributed operating systems for such things (we used TinyOS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyOS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyOS): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartdust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartdust
- dev1n 14y agoThis reminds me of a novel I recently finished. For those of you who have not read Kill Decision by Daniel Suarez, I highly suggest it. It is a very interesting story about drone warfare and artificial intelligence. This quadcopter is eerily similar to the ones described in his novel.
- Ecio78 14y agoHN news from a couple of days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5150129 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5150129
- acc00 14y agoIf you don't mind having a somewhat larger quadrotor, consider getting something like Attop Intruder [0] and replacing its PCB with a Flymaple-A [1]. At $120 and some soldering, this gives you 18 minutes flight time and >50g payload. Flymaple seems to be rather close to Crazyflie hardware-wise. [0] http://www.walkera-parts.com/shop/m74/ATTOP-TOYS/p14245/ATTOP-TOYS-(AT-9806)-Intruder-4CH-UFO-RTF-2.4GHz/product_info.html http://www.walkera-parts.com/shop/m74/ATTOP-TOYS/p14245/ATTO... [1] http://www.dfrobot.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=739 http://www.dfrobot.com/index.php?route=product/product&p...
- zopticity 14y agoOh, it sounds like a fly (insect). I just want to squash it =) Just kidding. It looks really cool.