Quadcopters are very popular these days, but one can also increase number of motors to a multicopter.

One can also make it big, like these Germans did. Simple, yet amazing.

After my friend Jonny bought himself a flying wing by robbe when all my aicrafts were grounded. I speculated on how quick I could build my own. I already had a small brushed motor with speed controlled form an old MS hornet (heli) by  MS Composit. Two $2 servoes, $16 DSM2 receiver and 2S 800mAh LiPo batteries I had laying.

Later that day I sat down with some 6mm depron and started cutting. I cutted one side of the wing first to make sure it was proper. Then i copied it onto another piece and glued them togheter with UHU and CA. A carbon list was installed for stiffness. To get buoyancy and more stiffness I chose to install some addional 50mm wide 6mm depron on leading edge of the wing. Known as KF-airfoil KFM-2.

Rudders were cut 30mm wide and some fin stabilators were added to the sides. The heavy yet small motor had to be installed closer to the front than first expected to make CG right.

CG were found using info from this site. and image.

I carved the batterydepartment throught the front to make the plane more areodynamic.

The whole thing landed on 168g included battery with an wingspan of 690mm.

The making of the plane took only one hour! Installing the rest and aerodynamic tuning for all the components was a bit longer.

Scratchbuilt wing

As little I made RC boats from scratch and since my knowledge about air vehicles is bigger I just had to build another “boat” when I came accross L‘Hydro-Foam. This “boat” has the same abilities as the ship in the Norwegian folk tale Askeladden, “Et skip som går like godt i lufta som til lands og til vanns”.

As usually I printed the PDF available on the French site and cut depron in given shapes.

Check out my gallery for build pictures

Hydrofoam build

Maiden flight on youtube

Check out this simple little robot which does nothing else than sweeping the ground beneath: http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/bristlebot

Why not make a larger version and make it clean your crypt?

So I decided to make something with RC-servos using the Arduino board and the sensor shield which I recently purchased.

I went ahead figuring out how to send arrow signals from my computer to Arduino using USB interface.

Using void setup() { Serial.begin(9600); } on Arduino and screen /dev/ttyUSB0 9600 on my computer, I managed to send commands back and forth. I hooked up the standard servo library and write some code before I mounted the Arduino board on my mini rock crawler. I now had a computer controlled car. Because of Arduino`s simple interface I had it all up and running around an hour. Check the small video and code below.

You can view and or use the code as you like below. (Sorry about the indention, WordPress messes it up).

After running this motor to hard outside, I managed to burn the motor. You can see pictures of the “burnt” motor in the gallery below.

First of all I opened the motor to take a look noticing protective isolation layer on the copper were melted. Not so strange, because when I approaced the motor after the plane fell from the sky, it was insane hot.

Before removing all wire I measured the wire diameter to 0,30mm. I found this king of wire inside very small tranformators in a computer power supply.

By using this picutre, found on this page. I was able to re wound the motor.

I actually did wound all the poles at the same time, well, one by one, but all three wires were in use, if you follow.

After finish wounding I had to connect wires together to make only three wires, brushless motor has three out wires.

Since it`s a pretty fast motor I made a delta hookup, but I did a mistake at first. This motor should have around 195mOhm per 14-turn, maybe I did not mention it is a 14-turn motor. Which means each pole (there are nine here) needs 14 turns of isolated copper wire and in a small motor like this one, it`s not that easy. Anyway, by hooking up wrong end`s I broke a ESC of mine ($10) so I had to buy another one.

The motor works just great now and I might add a video later.

Gallery

Fixing brushless motor

http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/

Speaks for itself.

I come across this cool robot a while back. I never mention it here before since I assume everyone had seen it, but to day I come across a paradoy on it, and it rocks.

Orginal:

Parody: