Category Archives: propeller

Hackaday Links: October 7, 2018

Posted on by

Ah, crap. We lost a good one, people. [Samm Sheperd] passed away last month. We’ve seen his stuff before, from a plane with a squirrel cage fan, to completely owning a bunch of engineering students by auditing a class. The obit is available as a Google Doc, and there’s a Samm Sheperd Memorial Fund for the Big Lake Youth Camp in Gladstone, Oregon.

FranLab is closing down! Fran is one of the hardware greats, and she’s being evicted. If you’ve got 2000sqft of workshop space in Philly you’d like to spare, you know who to talk to. There will, probably, …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Links: October 7, 2018→

The Carbon Fiber Construction Of Large Propellers

Posted on by

Props for your little RC airplane or drone are effectively consumables. They’re made of plastic, they’re cheap, and you’re going to break a lot of them. When you start swinging something larger than 12 inches or so, things start getting expensive. If you’re building gigantic octocopters or big RC planes, those props start adding up. You might not think you can build your own gigantic carbon fiber propellers, but [Tech Ingredients] is here to prove you wrong with an incredible video demonstration of the construction of large propellers

The key ideas behind the build are laid out in a video …read more

Continue reading The Carbon Fiber Construction Of Large Propellers→

Quadcopter Hardware Gets Classic Lake Bed Test

Posted on by

You’d be hard pressed to find an aircraft that wasn’t designed and tested without extensive use of simulation. Whether it’s the classic approach of using a scale model in a wind tunnel or more modern techniques such as computational fluid dynamics, a lot of testing happens before any actual hardware gets bolted together. But at some point the real deal needs to get a shakedown flight, and historically a favorite testing ground has been the massive dry lake beds in the Western United States. The weather is always clear, the ground is smooth, and there’s nobody for miles around.

Thanks …read more

Continue reading Quadcopter Hardware Gets Classic Lake Bed Test→

Firing Bullets Through Propellers

Posted on by

Early airborne combat was more like a drive-by shooting as pilot used handheld firearms to fire upon other aircraft. Whomever could boost firepower and accuracy would have the upper hand and so machine guns were added to planes. But it certainly wasn’t as simple as just bolting one to the chassis.

This was during World War I which spanned 1914 to 1917 and the controllable airplane had been invented a mere eleven years before. Most airplanes still used wooden frames, fabric-covered wings, and external cable bracing. The engineers became pretty inventive, even finding ways to fire bullets through the path …read more

Continue reading Firing Bullets Through Propellers→

Watch This Tiny Dome Auto-open and Close into a Propeller

Posted on by

Careful planning and simulation is invaluable, but it can also be rewarding to dive directly into prototyping. This is the approach [Carl Bugeja] took with his Spherical Folding Propeller design which he has entered into the Open Hardware Design Challenge category of The 2018 Hackaday Prize. While at rest, the folding propeller looks like a small dome attached to the top of a motor. As the motor fires up, centrifugal forces cause the two main halves of the dome to unfold outward where they act as propeller blades. When the motor stops, the assembly snaps shut again.

[Carl] has done …read more

Continue reading Watch This Tiny Dome Auto-open and Close into a Propeller→

3D Printed Propellers Take to the Skies

Posted on by

In the world of drones, propeller choice is key to performance. Selecting the right props can have a major effect on things like flight time, vibration, and a whole host of other factors. Thinking it might be fun to experiment, [RCLifeOn] decided to 3D print some props and head out for a flight.

The props are a fairly simple 3-bladed design, which were printed in both PETG and PLA. No major difference is noted between the two materials, and the quadcopter under test is able to fly with either. It was noted that the props perform particularly poorly in a …read more

Continue reading 3D Printed Propellers Take to the Skies→

3D Printed Airplane Engine Runs on Air

Posted on by

One of the most important considerations when flying remote-controlled airplanes is weight. Especially if the airplane has a motor, this has a huge potential impact on weight. For this reason, [gzumwalt] embarked on his own self-imposed challenge to build an engine with the smallest weight and the lowest parts count possible, and came away with a 25-gram, 8-part engine.

The engine is based around a single piston and runs on compressed air. The reduced parts count is a result of using the propeller axle as a key component in the engine itself. There are flat surfaces on the engine end …read more

Continue reading 3D Printed Airplane Engine Runs on Air→

Hackaday Links: July 16, 2017

Posted on by

[Carl Bass] has joined the board at Formlabs. This is interesting, and further proof that Print The Legend is now absurdly out of date and should not be used as evidence of anything in the world of 3D printing.

Here’s something cool: a breadboardable dev board for the Parallax Propeller.

Finally, after years of hard work, there’s a change.org petition to stop me. I must congratulate [Peter] for the wonderful graphic for this petition.

Want some flexible circuits? OSHPark is testing something out. If you have an idea for a circuit that would look good on Kapton instead of FR4, …read more

Continue reading Hackaday Links: July 16, 2017→

Helix Display Brings Snake Into Three Dimensions

Posted on by

Any time anyone finds a cool way to display in 3D — is there an uncool way? — we’re on board. Instructables user [Gelstronic]’s method involves an array of spinning props to play the game Snake in 3D.

The helix display consists of twelve props, precisely spaced and angled using 3D-printed parts, each with twelve individually addressable LEDs. Four control groups of 36 LEDs are controlled by the P8XBlade2 propeller microcontroller, and the resultant 17280 voxels per rotation are plenty to produce an identifiable image.

In order to power the LEDs, [Gelstronic] used wireless charging coils normally used for cell …read more

Continue reading Helix Display Brings Snake Into Three Dimensions→

KFC Winged Aircraft Actually Flys

Posted on by

[PeterSripol] has made an RC model airplane but instead of using normal wings he decided to try getting it to fly  using some KFC chicken buckets instead. Two KFC buckets in the place of wings were attached to a motor which spins the buckets up to speed. With a little help from the Magnus effect this creates lift.

Many different configurations were tried to get this contraption off the ground. They eventually settled on a dual prop setup, each spinning counter to each other for forward momentum. This helped to negate the gyroscopic effect of the spinning buckets producing the …read more

Continue reading KFC Winged Aircraft Actually Flys→