Category: drone hacks

Autonomous vehicles make a regular appearance around here, as does [Daniel Riley] aka [rctestflight]. His fascination with building long-endurance autonomous vehicles continues, and this time he built an autonomous air boat. This craft incorporates a lot of the lessons learnt from his autonomous boat that used a plastic food container. One of the biggest issues […]
Researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) recently released a video showing their nature-inspired drone that is capable of breaking out into five separate smaller drones. The drones each have auto-rotating wings that slow their rate of descent, similar to seed pods from a maple tree. Due to their design, the drones […]
When YouTuber MrBeast hit 20 million subscribers, it kicked off the promise to plant 20 million new trees by 2020. While seeming rather mad for a single person to attempt such a feat, the channel has begun an organized effort under the banner of ‘Team Trees‘. With many famous and less famous YouTubers and other […]
While there are some fixed-wing drones in the hobby world, most of us around here think of the quadcopter when this word is mentioned. There have been some fixed-wings around, and lots of multi-rotors, but not much of a mix of the two. [Paweł] wanted to see what would happen if he mixed these two […]
Sun Tzu said, “The line between disorder and order lies in logistics.” This is as true in the modern world as it was 2500 years ago, and logistics have helped win and lose many wars and battles over the centuries. To this end, Logistical Gliders Inc. is developing one-time use, unmanned delivery gliders, for the […]
Power is the bane of drone pilots. You’d like to fly longer which means a bigger battery. But a bigger battery will weigh more which leads to less flight time. You have to strike a balance and for most consumer drones that balance is about 20 minutes of flight time, more or less. Researchers at […]
Controlling a single drone takes up a considerable amount of concentration and normally involves wearing silly goggles. It only gets harder if you want to control a swarm. Researchers at Skolkovo Institute of Technology decided Jedi mind tricks were the best way, and set up swarm control using hand gestures.  We’ve seen something similar at […]
Quietly released and speedily buried by Parliamentary wrangles over Brexit is the news that Sussex Police have exhausted all lines of inquiry  into the widely publicised drone sighting reports that caused London’s Gatwick Airport to be closed for several days last December. The county’s rozzers have ruled out 96 ‘people of interest’ and combed through […]
With so many capabilities for obstacle avoidance, the only natural progression for drones would be for them to be hand-controlled. For Turkish inventor [metehanemlik], even this wasn’t enough of a challenge, as he decided to create the ESP8266-Powered Mini Drone: ESPcopter, a programmable Arduino-compatible modular drone that is open to modding through expansion shields. Not […]
Ah, stereotypes. Once they’ve solidified it’s surprisingly hard to shake them. When non-Australians think of a generic Aussie then, the chances are that a Crocodile Dundee type of character will spring to mind — a ‘Strine-speaking outdoorsman with a beer in hand. This group of Aussies aren’t helping the case, with a video posted by […]