Collaborate Disseminate
It’s the first ever prosecution under UK drone laws for a flight that could have turned deadly, as did a recent helicopter disaster in Leicester. Continue reading Drone owner fined for putting police helicopter crew ‘in danger’
Mountain goats in Olympic National Park are obsessed with human urine and are now a public nuisance. Continue reading A National Park Is Airlifting Hundreds of Mountain Goats That Have Gone Crazy for Human Pee
We’re not entirely sure what to call this one. It’s got the usual trappings of a drone, but with only a single rotor it clearly can’t be called by any of the standard multicopter names. Helicopter? Close, but not quite, since the rotor blades are fixed-pitch. We’ll just go with “monocopter” for now and sort out the details later for this ducted-fan, thrust-vectored UAV.
Whatever we choose to call it — builder [tesla500] dubbed it the simultaneously optimistic and fatalistic “Ikarus” — it’s really unique. The monocopter is built around a 90-mm electric ducted fan mounted vertically on a 3D-printed …read more
Continue reading Single-Rotor Drone: a Thrust-Vectoring Monocopter
The DIY aircraft crashed in Alberta, killing the pilot. Continue reading Canadian Man Dies in ‘Amateur-Built’ Helicopter Crash
While quadcopters seem to attract all the attention of the moment, spare some love for the rotary-wing aircraft that started it all: the helicopter. Quads may abstract away most of the aerodynamic problems faced by other rotorcraft systems through using software, but the helicopter has to solve those problems mechanically. And they are non-trivial problems, since the pitch of the rotors blades has to be controlled while the whole rotor disk is tilted relative to its axis.
The device that makes this possible is the swashplate, and its engineering is not for the faint of heart. And yet [MonkeyMonkeey] chose …read more
Continue reading Casting Tour-De-Force Results In Swashplate For Scale Helicopter
It’s time once again to see how those tax dollars are spent, this time in the form of a “Data Entry Keyboard” manufactured by Hughes Helicopters. This device was built circa 1986 or so, and was used in the AH-64A Apache. Specifically, this panel would have been located by the gunner’s left knee, and served as a general purpose input device for the Apache’s Fire Control System. Eventually the Apache was upgraded with a so-called “glass cockpit”; consolidating various vehicle functions into a handful of multi-purpose digital displays. As such, this particular device became obsolete and was pulled from the …read more
Continue reading Milspec Teardown: AH-64A Apache Data Entry Panel
Today, when we say “Jesus nut”, we’re not referring to the people who spend their days proselytizing down at the mall. The term, likely spawned in the Vietnam war, refers to the main nut holding the rotors on to the mast of a helicopter which is in the shape of the Christian cross. If the “Jesus nut” was to fail, the rotors would detach from the craft, and there would be little for crews to do except to pray.
[Marius] was presented with a failed Jesus nut, though thankfully from an R/C helicopter, meaning there was no loss of life. …read more
Continue reading 3D Print the Blasphemous Helicopter Part Known as a Jesus Nut
The Syma S107G is a venerable stalwart of the micro helicopter market. Affordable, robust, and ubiquitous, the S107G relies on infrared to receive its control signals. Emboldened by the prior work of others, [Robert] set out to control his with a Playstation 2 controller.
In this project, [Robert] is standing on the shoulders of giants, so to speak – we’ve seen others reverse engineer the S107G’s communications protocol before. [Robert] combined the efforts of several others to understand how to send commands to the helicopter, including use of two separate channels for controlling two at once.
With the knowledge of …read more
Continue reading Controlling A Micro Helicopter with a PS2 Controller
The Syma S107G is a venerable stalwart of the micro helicopter market. Affordable, robust, and ubiquitous, the S107G relies on infrared to receive its control signals. Emboldened by the prior work of others, [Robert] set out to control his with a Playstation 2 controller.
In this project, [Robert] is standing on the shoulders of giants, so to speak – we’ve seen others reverse engineer the S107G’s communications protocol before. [Robert] combined the efforts of several others to understand how to send commands to the helicopter, including use of two separate channels for controlling two at once.
With the knowledge of …read more
Continue reading Controlling A Micro Helicopter with a PS2 Controller
“She’s going up and down on him.” Continue reading The National Guard Thought This Awkward Sex Tape Was a Good Example of Spy Gear