Collaborate Disseminate
When the electric guitar was first produced in the 1930s, there was some skepticism among musicians as to whether or not this instrument would have lasting impact or be a …read more Continue reading Get More Freedom With This Guitar Pedal
Most multi-rotor aircraft are about as aerodynamic as a brick. Unless all its motors are turning and the control electronics are doing their thing, most UAVs are quickly destined to …read more Continue reading Clever Control Loop Makes This Spinning Drone Fault-Tolerant
You’ve got to hand it to [Tom Stanton] – he really thinks outside the box. And potentially outside the atmosphere, to wit: we present his reaction control gas thruster-controlled drone.
Before anyone gets too excited, [Tom] isn’t building drones for use in a vacuum, although we can certainly see a …read more
Continue reading Unconventional Drone Uses Gas Thrusters For Control
When you think about all the forces that have to be balanced to keep a drone stable, it’s a wonder that the contraptions stay in the air at all. And when the only option for producing those forces is blowing around more or less air it’s natural to start looking for other, perhaps better ways to achieve flight control.
Taking a cue from the spacecraft industry, [Tom Stanton] decided to explore reaction wheels for controlling drones. The idea is simple – put a pair of relatively massive motorized wheels at right angles to each other on a drone, and use …read more
Continue reading Reaction Wheels Almost Control This Unusual Drone
Some aspects of humanity affect all of us at some point in our lives. Whether it’s getting caught in the rain without an umbrella, getting a flat tire on the way to work, or upgrading a Linux package which somehow breaks the entire installation, some experiences are truly universal. Among these is pulling a few squares of toilet paper off the roll, only to have the entire roll unravel with an overly aggressive pull. It’s possible to employ a little technology so that none of us have to go through this hassle again, though.
[William Holden] and [Eric Strebel] have …read more
Classes are over at Cornell, and that means one thing: the students in [Bruce Land]’s microcontroller design course have submitted their final projects, many of which, like this flight control system for Google Earth’s flight simulator, find their way to the Hackaday tips line.
We actually got this tip several days ago, but since it revealed to us the previously unknown fact that Google Earth has a flight simulator mode, we’ve been somewhat distracted. Normally controlled by mouse and keyboard, [Sheila Balu] decided to give the sim a full set of flight controls to make it more realistic. The controls …read more
Continue reading Microcontroller and IMU Team Up for Simple Flight Sim Controls
Beware, arachnophobes, the robots are coming for you!
What else would you be expected to think if you watched a hexapod robot display its best Transformers impression by turning into a wheel and pushing itself in your direction? The BionicWheelBot — developed by [Festo] — should rightly remind you of the cartwheeling Flic-Flac spider, the main inspiration for the robot. Of course, Star Wars fans might justifiably see a Droideka.
The BionicWheelBot can — almost — seamlessly transition between crawling around on six legs, to literally rolling away. To do so, its three pairs of legs sequentially fold up into …read more