Interaction designer Jasper van Loenen created a kit for turning everyday objects into drones. He 3D printed clamping mounts for four motors and an enclosure for all the electronics (4 ESCs, a receiver, bluetooth module, and OpenPilot CC3D control board). By clamping the kit to, say, a bike wheel, you can turn it into a drone!
The pace of change has accelerated, so much so that you can now make a living doing jobs that didn’t even exist 10 years ago.
Our friends Nick, Kevin, and Jess from Parallax just released this video with tips for getting started with the ELEV-8 Quadcopter. It outlines common beginner mistakes and how to correct them, along how to safely get airborne the first time out.
The Maker Shed now has the ELEV-8 Quadcopter kit by Parallax! This kit takes a little skill to put together, but it’s a fantastically fun build and even more fun to fly.
Because we’re classy like that. So please stop asking. Those of you who cannot resist your morbid curiosity are now empowered with the necessary Googlon. Godspeed.
A group of UPenn Engineering students have taken several quadrotors and turned them into robotic musicians. We’ve seen the great swarming abilities of these machines recently, but now using various instruments and noisemakers, these aerial drones manage to plunk out a fairly convincing version of the “James Bond” theme.
They call it “juggling,” which, I must say, in deference to all the jugglers out there: it ain’t. But “catch” is still an extremely impressive addition to the extremely impressive list of extremely impressive stunts which quadrotor UAVs have been pulling off recently. Filmed at the Flying Machine Arena research facility at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich. [via adafruit]
