Drone Made of Lego Takes Flight 83
TVmisGuided writes "People have made UAVs out of wood, aluminum, even 3D-printed plastic. But now comes the tale of C#/C++ developer Ed Scott who, after damaging his Gaui 330x, got the idea of designing and building a Lego quadcopter. And it worked! 'Most people go to their favorite hobby store to get parts for their UAV, I go to my kid's playroom.'"
Conditioned Much? (Score:3, Insightful)
Last millenium weq had RC planes and shit. Why call them drones now? Is that to give legitimacy to extrajudicial killings, or is it to derive coolness from them? It's one thing or the other, that's for fucking sure, so tell me. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle is such a needy and funny thing to call it... you mean like a paper airplane? Or a helium balloon? WTF people. Oh, and this is bad enough without dragging your kid into it, btw. Just a thought. Now do your butthurt thingy where you mod me down as flamebait or troll, you know you wanna ^^
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This thing has first person view using a headset from the ground. There's a holy fuckload of negativity around here. I think the project is pretty awesome, and I didn't expect any more than the frame to be made of lego after reading the summary..
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They did use green - they had trees and stuff.
Not that the color really mattered to a kid. With regular bricks, you could make a delta wing fighter plane from the jumbo-jet wing sections. A missile defence system could be built from those 4x4 rotating turntables and a hinge joint. Use a couple of 8x1's or 8x2's for the missile and the sloping 2x1's for the missile wings.
As far as building tanks with Lego Technical kits, you could get the Technical Lego 856 Bulldozer [blogspot.no]. Strip the model down to a couple of long
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RTFA Much? (Score:3)
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Is that to give legitimacy to extrajudicial killings, or is it to derive coolness from them?
Nothing new there. The military has always played with language to dehumanize the enemy and sanitize the process of killing other people. Think of all the words you never heard before Iraq/Afghanistan: "Insurgent", "IED", etc. What happened to "rebel" and "bomb"?
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How is it trolling if I genuinely believe that calling this stuff "drones" is sucking murderer dick AT BEST, and that calling them unnmanned aerial vehicles is idiotic in any case?
You haven't even got the faintest clue what would constitute trolling, you just know it's an easy defense. Instead of dealing with what I said, make up a motivation for me saying it that allows you to weasel out.
The same goes for "flamebait": I don't pretend to despise you guys just to evoke a reaction, I truly think you're shit,
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RC planes didn't have cameras and autopilots, drones do.
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Got anything more than your word for that? I mean, I know it's what you think how the nomenclature works, but I couldn't find anything that actually supports this claim. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmanned_aerial_vehicle [wikipedia.org]
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Just as soon as you start coughing up paychecks, I'll start doing your research on these ever so critical topics for you.
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What? You make a claim, I ask you to back it up, you say "no, pay me"? You got it upside down buddy. If you want me to take what you said seriously in the slightest, cough up an argument. Or just shut up in the first place, but don't bitch at me for doing the work for you and seeing it to an end you don't like. The fucking nerve, the comedy and idiocy of it.
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Nope, you asked a question, I told you what I have observed for usage and suddenly you want a scholorly work on the subject. Sorry, no. This is NOT a debate, it was a discussion that you seem to be taking Waaaaayyyy too seriously.
So no, I really don't give a shit if you want to take me seriously or not.
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That's been brought up two times before, and both times it ended when I went "orly? can you actually back that up instead of just stating it?" e.g. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3328567&cid=42350553 [slashdot.org] Feel free to do better.
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Johann Lau is WRONG (Score:1)
Drone == automated, RC == remote pilot. (Score:2)
Last millenium weq had RC planes and shit. Why call them drones now?
I use drones, you can call them RC planes or model planes (as we do in Australia), I wont get upset.
To me the difference is a drone is autonomous whilst an RC plane requires continuous input from a remote pilot.
With our drone, we program it with a flight path and parameters and it does it's thing with little or no input from the user. We do manual take off and landings via remote but once it reaches the starting co-ords we flip it into automatic mode. The biggest usage we have for them is to take aeri
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We also have a NAZA controller but it does not do waypoints
We kind of need to do waypoints as we use it for aerial photography and remote sensing, the more accurate the positioning when we take the photo the less work required to mosaic them later. One of the drones we use is the Yamaha RMAX helicopter that can carry 20 KG, the other is a custom built (basically a kit built) petrol powered plane using a MicroPilot 2028G that can carry just under 30 KG, 20 KG is enough to lift any of our sensing packages (mostly regular and IR cameras but we can get LIDAR units for
nothing (Score:1)
Thats nothing. I worked on a project where we used lego mindstorm to guide a laser for lasik.
That's... (Score:1)
Actually pretty lame.
I mean, not only did he use a CAD program for a box with 4 arms, it doesn't even look "cool"... No lego fins, etc. Not even a minifig in a cockpit. It looks like every other quad-copter.
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He's not even using all Lego parts. And yes, there are indeed Lego propellors out there capable of generating propulsive thrust. And yes, you can even use an NXT smart brick to control a UAV.
But, worst of all it looks like he's committed one of deadliest Lego sins: irreversible modification of Lego bricks. How else are those motors staying on there?
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The true lego propellers I've seen would never be able to produce any thrust. The NXT + motors would be too heavy for it to fly, too.
Don't get me wrong, it'd be massively cool, but just sounds unfeasible using all Lego.
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Because it's female?
Re:That's... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is his doing something like this with his grandkids pretty lame? Seriously - he wasn't doing it for your approval and for you to be insulting to him (its not like he asked to be on slashdot) is a bit rude. What emotion inside you drove you to make that comment?
I applaud his work with his grandkids..
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It wasn't a comment on what he does with his grandkids. That's great and all that.
It was a comment on this being newsworthy, when the application of Lego was quite underwhelming.
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I made thing like the other things, but different (Score:2)
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Ah, but he did it using a computer ! Totally different thing !
He must annoy his kids (Score:5, Funny)
"Sorry champ, Daddy has dreams."
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The goal of the project was to build a quadcopter with low-cost replaceable parts. If you have a one piece wood or carbonfibre chassis, and something breaks, that's the whole chassis needing replacing. If the quadcopter is made from modular parts, that's a bit better, but you would still need to purchase custom replacement parts if they break. Build the quadcopter chassis out of RV parts and regular bricks, you can buy a bucket of them for $50.
design it into an Owl, (Score:1)
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"Young boy blinded today as friends Lego(tm) based flying machine smashes through bedroom window"
it's not to boil enthousiasm down, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
... as far as I can see, the only thing Lego in this quadcopter is the plastic structure. Motors are not, batteries are not, control electronics are not, RF and presumably remote control are not, servomotors are not.
So are we discussing a "drone using some lego bricks for the structure"?
H.
now mod me down, but remember I'm 50: at home I have older bricks than you (in addition to the vast amount aggregated by three sons)
Re:it's not to boil enthousiasm down, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is a neat hack in the best sense of "hack", since they already had the bricks and the quadcopter parts. Plus, since it was designed by the kids, I will cut them some slack. Still, I would like to see the next, stronger, lighter and not glued version using Lego Technic beams. There is too much room for improvement :).
Re:it's not to boil enthousiasm down, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
now mod me down, but remember I'm 50: at home I have older bricks than you (in addition to the vast amount aggregated by three sons)
Holy shit, I'm only 35 and I can use this insult all day, every day. Thanks.
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I have two sons and the Lego scars on the bottoms of my feet to prove it.
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I have two sons and the Lego scars on the bottoms of my feet to prove it.
I don't have any kids, but I still have Legos. Now if only I had room to bring them out and do something with them. I would sell them if only I thought I could get any decent percentage of money back out of them, because I'd be glad if some kid(s) somewhere were getting enjoyment out of them. I've let a lot of stuff go cheap but my Lego is not on that list :)
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Give them to some poor kids. No point in letting them waste your space.
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... as far as I can see, the only thing Lego in this quadcopter is the plastic structure. Motors are not, batteries are not, control electronics are not, RF and presumably remote control are not, servomotors are not.
From the summary:
after damaging his Gaui 330x, got the idea of designing and building a Lego quadcopter. And it worked! 'Most people go to their favourite hobby store to get parts for their UAV, I go to my kids playroom.
What part about "after damaging" and "get parts" didn't you understand?
Also, please share your plans to build a battery using only legos; I think we'd all be interested.
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Your kids must love you (Score:2)
"Most people go to their favorite hobby store to get parts for their UAV, I go to my kids playroom."
Dick.
I am the dad in the video, this is a Drone not RC (Score:1)
Big Deal (Score:2)
Toy quads! (Score:2)