Tiny Clever Quadrotors Now on Kickstarter | Hacker News Reader

Tiny Clever Quadrotors Now on Kickstarter

spectrum.ieee.org

65 pointseguizzo22 comments

I was expecting this to link to Kickstarted, not some blog.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/qfolabs/mimixtm-tilt-to-...

I agree about the direct link, but IEEE Spectrum is kind of a big deal.

My bad. It wasn't one I recognized right away, but had I stopped to actually look at it in stead of automatically expecting this to link to kickstarter then I would have given it more credit.

Saw John demo one of these a couple weeks ago at my FIRST Robotics club. Cool product, but man, I wish the battery lasted longer than 10 minutes per charge. Also, it would be amazing if the IR dogfighting system included lasers to paint where the shots were landing, so you could visually adjust your aim. Gonna have to sign up for a sponsorship.

All small rotocopters only get about 10 minutes per charge. My cheap and tiny Ladybird gets about 8 mins. They charge quickly though.

I was thinking removable battery so you could have a couple spares and keep flying while another is charging, but now I'm thinking you might actually want that downtime while the fixed battery recharges, so the motors can cool down a bit.

And to replace the broken pieces.

isn't 10 minutes pretty standard for electric RC copters/planes? I don't think there's a battery that can last longer than that without being insanely expensive.

I think weight is more the driving factor than cost.

Yeah, this is the issue with electric aircraft. Fossil fuels are still much more energy dense than batteries (40 MJ/kg vs 2 MJ/kg [1]), plus burning fuel provides a nice weight reduction which increases range [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Common_energy_de...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_(aircraft)

Are tiny combustion engines practical for RC aircraft?

Not indoors, but most RC planes are using engines (or were 15 years ago when I stopped paying attention).

If you're curious, it'll be enlightening to pay some attention to modern RC aircraft. Lipo batteries and inexpensive brushless motor controllers have changed the hobby dramatically since the '90s. Fuel powered RC aircraft are definitely no longer the majority.

Back in the 70's the CIA commissioned a watchmaker to build a hummingbird or dragonfly (forget which) that ran on a tiny two-piston combustion engine.

[edit] Source: http://hackaday.com/2011/02/10/the-cias-amazing-bots/

Yes. Besides piston-based engines, you can even get real turbines, both for jets and helicopters - see JetCat for example.

Getting "Service Unavailable - DNS failure" from IEEE site. Did HN really just stomp spectrum?

Maybe mods could change to link directly to kickstarter instead?

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/qfolabs/mimixtm-tilt-to-...

EDIT working again

The IEEE's datacenter in New Jersey has been without power for days and eventually ran out of generator fuel. There were some intermittent DNS issues after Spectrum moved to backup servers in Arizona. I've been told they're resolved now.

I'm glad to see they included $37k in the Kickstarter budget for regulatory certifications (CE, FCC, UL, etc.).

Many hardware projects on Kickstarter include no mention of it, and it's a pricey thing to skip.

I don't see how inverting the props is necessarily any more efficient.

From the Kickstarter: "Why are your props upside down? The inverted props give an efficiency gain proportional to the amount of obstacles in the air column. We've found it varied between 10-20% depending on the frame and protection ring design. The inverted props also let us put the props right in the middle of the center of gravity for awesome control response. Even better, with the props on the bottom they keep spinning when you run up against the ceiling making flying indoors a breeze."

There's some chinese comp selling $130 quadcops, linked to from diydrones

You can get small quadopters for $50, with control and everything. Look on banggood.com (they are lots of fun and worth the price)

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