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Comment by ge96 | Hacker News Reader

I used to be obsessed with rc ornithopters but I always thought the main problem was that hulking gear ratio/mechanism and the oscillation making it not really great for flight compared to fixed wing/propeller driven.

This one (servo driven) is really light compared to the usual RC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuOw6BUOo78

This guy does great work, it's like his obsession https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrB1pKInIu0

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Of course there is one available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/live/video/0a7d56413360489dbf25611edf...

Also: https://www.amazon.com/Kooteyybhyy-Ornithopter-Generation-He...

Which may be re-branded version of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6nuMDV6n18

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Hanvon/page/426FE09E-17DC-4FBB...

I found this forum: https://www.rcgroups.com/ornithopters-101/

Which led to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWqBoA5CfPs - really neat to see it climb and glide.

Yeah, totally subscribed to "that guy". I think he's been experimenting with ducted fans (kind of not ornithopters) and also dragon-fly type of flight with four wings (entomopter?).

Advanced bird drones must be born secret technology. It makes little sense how so much can be understood about birds and yet there is no perfect bird replica on the market aside from these pared down maker lab tier efforts.

And indeed, lending further credence to the born secret idea is that the CIA has been experimenting on bird drones since at least the 1960s (1), and this was only revealed to the public in 2013. The state of the art must be so far advanced. What a prize for an intelligence agency to be able to create a surveillance system where it does not matter if it is detected on radar, or visualized at all because it looks exactly like indigenous bird populations.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_AQUILINE

I had a really stylish robot dragonfly that I got from Big Lots at a huge discount, trouble was it could not fly in any amount of wind and the only place I could fly it was in Barton Hall.

I might know the one you're talking about, did it have a fan as a rudder?

Oh speaking of dragonfly-like ornithopter this one is hardcore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCrS52sM3Zs

Reminds me of that Chicken Run movie ha

It was this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlyTech_Dragonfly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7j6KPbn4eE

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