Impressive Star Wars X-Wing Foam Drone

We’ve written about the amazing drones of French hobbyist Olivier C before. He’s been gradually building up an entire fleet of Star Wars-themed drones using foam as his main modeling material. So far, he’s done a Millennium Falcon, an Imperial Star Destroyer, a Snowspeeder, a Tie Interceptor, and now, an X-Wing Incom T-70, the model from the forthcoming film, Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

On the RC Groups forums, Olivier does a good job of detailing the builds. They aren’t step-by-step, but with lots of build photos and notes, you get a pretty good idea of how he goes about designing, building, prototyping, and testing his models.

For his Incom T-70 “foamie,” he used his Omen 410 custom carbon and aluminum quadcopter frame and Quantum 2217 motors. He controls the craft with a Naza flight controller plus GPS module and a Futaba 14SG receiver. In the notes on the forum, he says that the foam body on this one was fairly easy to build, at least relative to some of his earlier models.

Rough-Cut Flight Test

In this video, Olivier does a flight test of the roughed-out foam body. He had a little bit of a struggle fitting the drone into the foam with enough clearance for the four props. One of the smart features of his foamie drones is that uses his custom Omen 410 quadcopter on many of them and designs the model so that the 410 slots in and straps on. That way, he can slot in the drone like a cartridge into different bodies.

Maiden Voyage

Here he is flight-testing his finished model. Olivier says he had a hard time getting this footage. He went three times, and all three times, it was very windy in the flying field.

Build Gallery

Here are a few of the images of the X-Wing build taken from the RC Groups thread. Read through the entire build log if you’re interested in potentially building a similar model. This single forum thread contains all of Olivier’s projects. If you’re into DIY drone-building, Star Wars, or “foamies” (flyers fashioned from Styrofoam), this forum is definitely worth your time.