Collaborate Disseminate
One of the best things to come from the growing drone industry is the development of compact and powerful brushless motors. We’ve seen several multi-rotors capable of carrying a human, but electric helicopters are rare. [OskarRDA] decided to experiment with …read more
Continue reading Manned Electric Helicopter With 7 Tail Rotors
The news was recently abuzz with stories of how the Mars 2020 mission, which launched from Cape Canaveral at the end of July, had done something that no other spacecraft had done before: it had successfully charged the batteries aboard a tiny helicopter that is hitching a ride in the …read more
Continue reading An Up-Close Look at the First Martian Helicopter
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys recap a week of hacks. A telescope mirror that can change shape and a helicopter without a swashplate lead the charge for fascinating engineering. These are closely followed by a vibratory wind generator that has no blades to spin. The Open Source Hardware …read more
They say that drummers make the best helicopter pilots, because to master the controls of rotary-wing aircraft, you really need to be able to do something different with each limb and still have all the motions coordinate with each other. The control complexity is due to the mechanical complexity of …read more
Continue reading Building and Flying a Helicopter With a Virtual Swashplate
Defense companies Leonardo and Thales have successfully tested the Martlet Lightweight Multirole Missile (LMM). The Thales-built missile being developed for the Royal Navy was fired during air trials from April 27 to May 7, 2020 from a Leonardo AW159 W… Continue reading Leonardo and Thales test fire Martlet multi-role small missile
Boeing has revealed its entry for the US Army’s Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) prototype competition. The conceptual rotorcraft is one of five competing designs by Boeing, Bell, AVX Aircraft, Karem Aircraft, and Sikorsky to replace the Ar… Continue reading Boeing unveils Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft concept
While Mars may be significantly behind its sunward neighbor in terms of the number of motor vehicles crawling over its surface, it seems like we’re doing our best to close that gap. Over the last 23 years, humans have sent four successful rovers to the surface of the Red Planet, …read more
For many of us who grew up in the 1970s, “VertiBird”, the fly-it-yourself indoor helicopter, was a toy that was begged for often enough that it eventually appeared under the Christmas tree. And more than a few of the fascinating but delicate toys were defunct by Christmas afternoon, victims of …read more
Continue reading Classic Toy Helicopter Flies Again as DIY Version
Among the most dangerous jobs in the United States are timberjack and aircraft pilot. Combining the two wouldn’t sound like a recipe for success, but in fact it makes the job of trimming trees near pipelines and power lines much safer. That’s what this helicopter-suspended chainsaw does. And it definitely …read more
Not so very long ago, orbital rockets simply didn’t get reused. After their propellants were expended on the journey to orbit, they petered out and fell back down into the ocean where they were obliterated on impact. Rockets were disposable because, as far as anyone could tell, building another one …read more