
Tiny, Hackable Quadcopter Drone Launches Pre-Orders - cyphersanctus
http://www.wired.com/design/2013/02/crazyflie-nano/
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boredguy8
As these get smaller and smaller, we get closer and closer to a dog pod grid:

    
    
      Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off
      nowadays. Nanotech materials were stronger. Computers were infinitesimal. Power
      supplies were much more potent. It was almost difficult not to build things 
      that were lighter than air. . . .
    
      Given that it was so easy to make things that would float in air, it was not 
      much of a stretch to add an air turbine. This was nothing more than a small 
      propeller, or series of them, mounted in a tubular foramen wrought through 
      the body of the aerostat, drawing in air at one end and forcing it out the other
      to generate thrust. A device built with several thrusters pointed along 
      different axes could remain in one position, or indeed navigate through space.
    
      Each aerostat in the dog pod grid was a mirror-surfaced, aerodynamic teardrop 
      just wide enough, at its widest part, to have contained a pingpong ball. These 
      pods were programmed to hang in space in a hexagonal grid pattern, about ten 
      centimeters apart near the ground (close enough to stop a dog but not a cat, 
      hence "dog pods") and spaced wider as they got higher. In this fashion a hemi-
      spherical dome was limned around the sacrosanct airspace of the New Atlantis 
      Clave. When wind gusted, the pods all swung into it like weathervanes, and the 
      grid deformed for a bit as the pods were shoved around; but all of them even-
      tually worked their way back into place, swimming upstream like minnows, pro-
      pelling the air turbines. The 'bines made a thin hissing noise, like a razor 
      blade cutting air, that, when multiplied by the number of pods within earshot, 
      engendered a not altogether cheerful ambience. Enough wrestling with the wind, 
      and a pod's battery would run down. Then it would swim over and nuzzle its 
      neighbor. The two would mate in midair, like dragonflies, and the weaker would 
      take power from the stronger. The system included larger aerostats called nurse 
      drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly 
      selected pods all over the grid, which would then distribute it to their neigh-
      bors. If a pod thought it was having mechanical trouble, it would send out a 
      message, and a fresh pod would fly out from the Royal Security installation be-
      neath Source Victoria and relieve it so that it could fly home to be decompiled.
    

\--Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

~~~
GuiA
Reminds me of one of my graduate classes, which was about designing
distributed operating systems for such things (we used TinyOS:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyOS>):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartdust>

~~~
dferlemann
I did it, too. I used TinyOS and Intelmote2 and designed a interface board to
integrate Intelmote2 devices with SRV-1 tank robots. nesC has some learning
curve, but it was fun experience :)

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rdl
I wonder what it will be like in a decade or so looking back on the lovely
period where only the US Government had lethal drones, and operated them with
relative restraint.

~~~
jrochkind1
> I wonder what it will be like in a decade or so looking back on the lovely
> period where only the US Government had lethal drones, and operated them
> with relative restraint.

You are exactly right. Except of course that the current 'relative restraint'
is in the eye of the beholder, and it probably doesn't seem like 'relative
restraint' to those living in certain areas of Pakistan.

But yeah, soon enough that'll be all of us. We're in for a world of horror. If
we were wise, we'd be establishing the idea that military drones are to be
prohibited by international treaty and considered a war crime, not normalizing
them.

~~~
yk
A international treaty would probably not work well, since military drones are
actually useful for combat. Unlike biological weapons, were the victim has two
weeks of incubation period to defeat you, or chemical weapons, which are quite
useless against hardened targets. ( And since WWII there was no conflict which
came close to the nuclear threshold.) Therefore an AI arms control regime
would be a lot harder to construct than a WMD one.

Having said that, I am actually not very pessimistic about drones. I think
that they are similar to cars, which enable a quick get away for the
perpetrators of a crime, but are in fact more dangerous in accidents than as
means of a crime. ( And similar, if there are thousands of pizza delivery
drones then some of them will fall out of the sky by pure statistics.)

~~~
jrochkind1
landmines are useful for combat too. Oh yeah, the US refuses to sign that one
too, right?

If it wasn't useful for combat, nobody would use it, right? You only need
international law to try and prevent things that _are_ useful in military
objectives, but are so dangerous to humanity that we wish to prevent their
use.

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cwilson
The inductive charging hack is SO freaking awesome. I am going to have a base-
station on my desk for it to land on and charge.

~~~
spuz
It's a great idea but that big stack of copper coils has got to weigh the
copter down and likely reduce the fly time significantly.

~~~
yk
But it can reload by itself, so flying time should be increased. ( It would be
cool to build something that you can reload the drone in the air. Some kind of
Tesla coil for example. :)

~~~
Florin_Andrei
A quad copter actually requires a lot of energy to stay aloft. Folks who build
regular quads, using 2000 ... 3500 mAh batteries, get something like 10 ... 15
min flight time. That's a lot of energy going down the wind.

You might be able to juice it up in midair, but the field would have to be
somehow focused on the quad, otherwise you'll never get the required power
density.

~~~
yk
That would be something in the range of a 20 W at the drone. So something like
a modified microwave oven should do it. ( The drone flies into the oven,
recharges in flight, flies out when charged.) That has the additional
advantage that no 200 W radio emitters are jamming all cell phones in the
neighborhood.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
It's gonna be tough on the batteries. If you want any sort of decent battery
life, the charge current must be pretty small - at least compared to the max
discharge current.

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nona
Right now it's vapour, but there's also this:
<http://www.alwaysinnovating.com/products/mecam.htm>

It promises better hardware (Cortex-A9 SoC, 1.0-1.5GHz CPU, 1GB RAM, SD card,
2.4GHz/5GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), at a third of the price (MSRP: $49).

But again, it's not real (yet?) - whereas the pre-order of the Crazyflie Nano
has at least already started. And they seem to have a firm shipping date.

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jug6ernaut
Very cool. Though the 7 minute flight time is rather disappointing.

I know this would increase costs a LOT but it would be awesome if it could be
redesigned to use smaller chips and put more of the weight to the battery.

On that can anyone explain to me why they positioned the batter on the top of
the device? Wouldn't it be better balanced to have placed it below the body?
Not that stability looked like an issue just seems like an odd design choice.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _Very cool. Though the 7 minute flight time is rather disappointing._

It's pretty standard for any electric copter these days. It's a simple matter
of energy density.

If you go on hobbyking.com and build a standard-size quad from parts, you
won't get much more flight time than that. Somewhat better, sure, but not a
whole lot.

This is reason #387 why we need a revolution in energy storage.

~~~
bri3d
I get 13 minutes out of a 3300mAh 3S Turnigy "nano-tech." 10x4.5 props, 1100kv
motors.

My payload capacity isn't particularly high but a GoPro sans case is only just
over 90 grams, so it works fine.

I do agree that we're reliant on advancements in energy storage to push the
flight time envelope, but improving even nearly twofold on 7 minutes isn't
particularly difficult.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
So how about this:

<http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1666155>

Very simple chassis, Depron and some wood sticks. 1500kv motors. 5x3 props.
Turnigy nano-tech battery, but with a choice of two models:

1\. Either 1000 mAh weighing 79g

2\. Or 1400 mAh weighing 119g.

Which battery would you choose?

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acc00
If you don't mind having a somewhat larger quadrotor, consider getting
something like Attop Intruder [0] and replacing its PCB with a Flymaple-A [1].

At $120 and some soldering, this gives you 18 minutes flight time and >50g
payload. Flymaple seems to be rather close to Crazyflie hardware-wise.

[0] [http://www.walkera-parts.com/shop/m74/ATTOP-
TOYS/p14245/ATTO...](http://www.walkera-parts.com/shop/m74/ATTOP-
TOYS/p14245/ATTOP-TOYS-\(AT-9806\)-Intruder-4CH-UFO-
RTF-2.4GHz/product_info.html)

[1]
[http://www.dfrobot.com/index.php?route=product/product&p...](http://www.dfrobot.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=739)

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dev1n
This reminds me of a novel I recently finished. For those of you who have not
read _Kill Decision_ by Daniel Suarez, I highly suggest it. It is a very
interesting story about drone warfare and artificial intelligence. This
quadcopter is eerily similar to the ones described in his novel.

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sosuke
My first thought is to make Quadcopter obstacle courses for group racing.
Combine that with augmented reality power-ups that you could use to freeze an
opponent and we have a Mario Kart Racing style game.

~~~
stephengillie
Would you allow automated competitors? Who's faster at learning the course,
the twitchy redbull'd racer, or the fast-prototyping hacker?

~~~
sosuke
Both! We would have the human class and script class competitions and then a
FFA class. I like this idea more and more.

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ChuckMcM
They are doing this through Seeedstudios (the number of 'e's is important!)
who, when I was with Google, we did a group buy of their digital oscilloscope
kits. It turned out quite well so I wasn't worried about pre-ordering through
them.

Now to think up some exceptionally opsish type thing to do with them, there is
data center re-con of course but I was thinking like "go sit on the bad top of
rack switch and blink your LED" kinds of things.

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stephengillie
This device has an onboard camera and a decent microcontroller (32 bit MCU @
72 MHz (128kb flash, 20kb RAM)). This is just begging to have OpenCV running
on it.

~~~
iliis
Sadly no camera per default, but you can 'easily' add one yourself.

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joshmlewis
I wish I was a programmer so I could build one and just fly it around. I know
that's not _the_ purpose and it specifically says it's not for toying around,
but with a camera I think this is really cool. Who wants to make one for me
for an additional cost? :)

~~~
stephengillie
Humans learn by playing. They're wrong about it "not being for toying around".

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pm90
This is brilliant. I can't stop wondering how this will make espionage much
more easy. Or even stalking.

Then, we will have a slew of companies that guarantee 'security from aerial
surveillance'. I'm sure they'll make a killing.

~~~
uptown
How about dropping things over prison walls? Seems like it'd be pretty easy
with these types of devices.

~~~
zalzane
how about scaling one up and making it deliver pizzas?

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Ecio78
HN news from a couple of days ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5150129>

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zopticity
Oh, it sounds like a fly (insect). I just want to squash it =) Just kidding.
It looks really cool.

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djb_hackernews
This is awesome.

If they aren't already working on it they need to build interfaces for mobile
devices.

~~~
robkomilan
The Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 already does that though the range is absolutely
horrid.

<http://ardrone2.parrot.com/usa/>

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IheartApplesDix
why is the propeller chassis made from circuit board? Isn't that kind of an
expensive and fragile solution?

~~~
TomNomNom
I assume it's mostly to keep weight down. I imagine it could also make
manufacture easier/cheaper; you'd need most of the board for the circuitry
anyway, so why spend more money a separate piece for the chassis?

Also: I don't know if you've ever tried to break or cut a circuit board but
it's pretty tough stuff for its weight too.

~~~
jlgreco
Yeah, worse case you could make an extended wire bumper that protects the
top/bottom of the device: <http://www.bitcraze.se/2012/10/protective-frame-
prototype/>

