This project (and thousands of others like it) have just recently been made possible by three things.
1) Small, high powered brushless motors reaching hobbyist level prices because of neodymium magnets and manufacturing techniques.
2) Control circuits becoming possible at this level as well thanks to the microcontrollers and sensors reaching the market that brought us things like arduino. (10 years ago a micro with 256k of onboard flash and a 3 axis gyro was the size of ham sandwich and cost as much as your car)
3) Cheap but very high power density lithium polymer batteries becoming available.
We're now at the point where we can make just about any little toy fly by festooning it with little propellers. So you can head down to the patent office every time you think of a new place to stick one. It will seem novel because even a few years ago, the "real" technologies that provided you with those little propellers didn't exist.
This toy is still as cool as all get-out. I just think he's wasting time if he goes any further than "pending" before he gets millions of $ in sales.
genuine newbie question: is it true? 10 years ago they wire still so big and expensive?
The idea is certainly novel as far as I know, though.
Working in software just has me take a big gulp when I read the section about a patent here.
The value could be twofold: the wheels could act as blade guards and the wheel would be outside of the prop's feed and wash airstream, which would probably lead to more desirable flight characteristics.
Maybe something for Revision 2 - as is, this is a cute combination of existing ideas into a cool new machine.
It kinda makes me think of the Hovercraft pickup in Carmageddon 3 (and Back to the Future).
The price tag is a still a bit high for what I would use as a toy, but if you consider the potential "drone" spinoff that's a steal.
The battery life is a bit limited "At the moment flying 11 min / driving up to 18 min, combined performance 15 min. "
Battery life is about what I'd expect from a quad. I have a sailplane that I'm building into an FPV platform; using a 2200mAH battery like this thing is specced for, I generally get around half an hour of flight time out of a battery charge, but that's with a single motor and having the option to cut the engine and glide intermittently.
This is the equivalent of saying he made it with a (commonly used plastic) * 10 * $fluff.
Here's a suggestion I'm going to throw out there. Instead of driving the wheel(s), use the propellers. When landing, at least two of the propellers pivot up and drive it around.
(You could also be clever and pivot the motors up about 60-degrees, so that there is forward force and an upwards force that 'lightens' the unit. And then you could drive the two stationary motors at slow speed to further 'lighten' the unit.)
That way, you don't need another motor to power it on land, and also you could put floats on it, so it would work in the water as well as on land.
A 2200mAH battery is already going to have limited run times in a quadcopter; trying to use the props for the wheels too would just make that worse.
On the plus side, you could do away with those goofy wheels. Too many parts (18? 18!) and I see tiny little gears prone to binding with the slightest bit of dirt. And just a single wheel is driven.
Also, the wheels being directly in the airflow of the propellers can't be a good thing.
Of course, to use the propellers on the ground, you'd need a mechanism to rotate the 'propeller pods' up. I think using the thrust of the props themselves to do this, with a micro servo to lock them in place, would accomplish this without adding much weight.
And if the propeller motors can be run backwards (I don't know offhand) then you can get rid of the steering mechanism as well.
IMO the best compromise is a gyro copter. http://www.blessthisstuff.com/stuff/vehicles/misc/gyrocopter...
Would actually be pretty good for park rangers, border control, protecting large industrial complexes (unpredictable camera points with computer vision to locate human movement)
Also, petrol/nitro engines are not the best for this kind of job, as it needs a very fast response in rotation speed and fuel engines have a high latency. What you can do is use a fuel engine as an electrical power generator or use variable-pitch propellers to get a faster response.
There's already a startup that takes care of printing T-shirt rewards.
1. Use a better microphone. The quality of your voice is not very good in the video.
2. Don't keep re-using the computer generated shots, it gets somewhat annoying.
Here are some ideas that could make for a better demo of B
- Test the flying mode somewhere more interesting like in the city where there are multiple levels to reach with flying.
- make it go from the first level of a house to the second level of a house by going outside of the window. It would be even more impressive on a higher building - go from the ground level to the roof level (and back).
Are there spokeless wheels like that available as an off-the-shelf R/C component?
It might be worth noting for anyone who thinks this is intriguing, there is actually quite a community for FPV / RC copters. One of my favorite YouTube channels (once you get over the username) is http://www.youtube.com/user/nastycop420 which is 3 guys who go to different destinations around the world, fly quadcopters, and post the videos on YouTube.
It's a radio-controlled helicoupeter!
I expect the price point and lack of the streamlined Amazon checkout for US backers is going to hurt this one.
"If you pledge $5, we'll send you a GI Joe to put inside your B"
Kickstart all the functioning GI Joe vehicles of my childhood.
