Category Archives: multirotor

Watching the Watchers: Are You The Star Of an Encrypted Drone Video Stream?

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Small aircraft with streaming video cameras are now widely available, for better or worse. Making eyes in the sky so accessible has resulted in interesting footage that would have been prohibitively expensive to capture a few years ago, but this new creative frontier also has a dark side when used to violate privacy. Those who are covering their tracks by encrypting their video transmission should know researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev demonstrated such protection can be breached.

The BGU team proved that a side-channel analysis can be done against behavior common to video compression algorithms, as certain changes …read more

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Watching the Watchers: Are You The Star Of an Encrypted Drone Video Stream?

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Small aircraft with streaming video cameras are now widely available, for better or worse. Making eyes in the sky so accessible has resulted in interesting footage that would have been prohibitively expensive to capture a few years ago, but this new creative frontier also has a dark side when used to violate privacy. Those who are covering their tracks by encrypting their video transmission should know researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev demonstrated such protection can be breached.

The BGU team proved that a side-channel analysis can be done against behavior common to video compression algorithms, as certain changes …read more

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The Zombie Rises Again: Drone Registration Is Back

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It’s a trope of horror movies that demonic foes always return. No sooner has the bad guy been dissolved in a withering hail of holy water in the denoeument of the first movie, than some foolish child in a white dress at the start of the next is queuing up to re-animate it with a careless drop of blood or something. If parents in later installments of popular movie franchises would only keep an eye on their darn kids, it would save everybody a whole lot of time!

The relevant passage can be found in section 1092(d) of the National …read more

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The British Drone Law Reaches Parliament

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We’ve brought you a variety of stories over the years covering the interface between multirotor fliers and the law, and looked at the credibility gap between some official incident reports and the capabilities of real drones. In the news this week is a proposed new law in front of the British House of Commons that would bring in a licensing scheme for machines weighing over 250 g, as well as new powers to seize drones. We’ve previously told you about the consultation that led up to it, and its original announcement. As a British voter with some interest in the …read more

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Where Can You Fly? Worldwide Drone Laws Mapped

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If you are a flier of a multirotor, or drone, you should be painfully aware of the regulations surrounding them wherever you live, as well as the misinformation and sometime bizarre levels of hysteria from uninformed people over their use.

Should you travel with your drone, you will also probably be resigned to being interrogated by airport staff high on The War On Terror security theatre, and you’ll probably not find it surprising that they have little idea of the laws and regulations over which they have pulled you aside. It’s a confusing situation, and it’s one that [Anil Polat] …read more

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UK To Register Multirotor fliers

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The British government has shown a surprisingly light touch towards drone fliers in the face of the strident media demands for them to be banned following a series of reports of near-misses with other aircraft. That is about to change with reports of the announcement of a registration scheme for craft weighing over 250 g (about 9 oz). Details are still a bit sketchy, but it is reported that there will be a written test and an element of geofencing around sensitive locations.

Our friendly professional multirotor flier’s reaction is that the existing laws are clear enough, and that this …read more

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London Gatwick Airport Closes Runway In Alleged Drone Strike

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London is one of those cities with an identity problem when it comes to airports. There is no one London airport, instead a group of airports serve the city at various distances from it. London Gatwick is the second largest of these, and sits with its single runway in the Sussex countryside about 30 miles south of the city.

If you follow British news sources, you may have heard a little about Gatwick in the last couple of days. Its runway was closed for two short periods and a selection of flights were diverted, because of what is being reported …read more

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The Tri Rotor Drone: Why Has It Been Overlooked?

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If you are a watcher of the world of drones, or multirotors, you may have a fixed idea of what one of these aircraft looks like in your mind. There will be a central pod containing batteries and avionics, with a set of arms radiating from it, each of which will have a motor and a propeller on its end. You are almost certainly picturing a four-rotor design, such as the extremely popular DJI Phantom series of craft.

Of course, four-rotor designs are just one of many possible configurations of a multirotor. You will commonly see octocopters, but sometimes we’ve …read more

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The ARRL Raises A Stink About Illegal FPV Transmitters

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We have all been beneficiaries of the boom in availability of cheap imported electronics over the last decade. It is difficult to convey to someone under a certain age the step change in availability of parts and modules that has come about as a result of both the growth of Chinese manufacturing and Internet sales that allow us direct access to sellers we would once only have found through a lengthy flight and an intractable language barrier.

So being able to buy an ESP8266 module or an OLED display for relative pennies is good news, but there is a downside …read more

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The World’s Lightest Brushless FPV Quadcopter

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When a claim is made for something being the world’s lightest it is easy to scoff, after all that’s a bold assertion to make. It hasn’t stopped [fishpepper] though, who claims to have made the world’s lightest brushless FPV quadcopter. Weighing in at 32.4 grams (1.143 oz) it’s certainly pretty light.

The frame is a circular design cut from carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer, and on it are mounted four tiny brushless motors. In the center are the camera and battery on a 3D printed mount, as well as custom flight and speed controller boards. There are a series of posts detailing some …read more

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