Lego quad-copter: your ultimate drone nightmare Two cameras, four engines, a GPS-driven autopilot: meet the Lego drone. Documented at a site called sUASNews, here, the quad-copter-style drone was built by the sons of a programmer and Lego enthusiast, Ed Scott. A central structure houses power and electronics, including a Go Pro camera to record the drone’s surroundings and …
Pretty good - Lego isn't the lightest of materials to build with.
But the video... that was fine until the closing moments where the camera operator consistently fails to zoom in on the 'copter. It's there! The dot! Right there! Zoom in on it, dammit! But no... not until the last moment... sigh.
Unfortunately, the camera operator appears to be trying to track that dot through a handicam viewfinder (eyepiece or screen) which is likely a lot lower resolution than is being recorded. He genuinely can't see that dot, most likely!
Plus the more you zoom, the smaller your angle of view, and tracking-by-hand anything moving at range is very difficult unless you are highly skilled (to experienced professional level).
Please give the designs and software to LEGO so they can mass-produce it :D over-charge for it :(
(Seriously, I never realised how damn expensive Lego is. Had loads of it as a kid, but recently bought some as a pressie for my fiancée's cousin and could not believe how much they are charging for even the simplest of kits!)
Kits are very expensive. Generic sets of blocks, a lot cheaper. You're usually paying for the design (or copyrights for the Star Wars, Harry Potter, LOTR et al) when you buy specific kits.
Just buy the blocks, let the kid's imagination do the design - will be a lot more satisfying too.
No, the one by Parraot will leave you. The one I saw tested at an air show went up, up, up and away! Not sure if the man ever found it, it almost didn't seem possible to find. There was talk of a few people that they hope it didn't come down on the interstate. The interstate was about 10 miles away, but by the look of that thing going, it wasn't going to crash any time soon. I assume there is not default check to test wether human control has happened over X amount ot time, which makes for shotty firmware. It was funny, but then again it wasn't mine.
... being Lego, you're only limited by your imagination as to what you fly - next week you could be the proud flyer of a petrol station, for example. Or more likely to cause fun, a cigar-shaped object or mysterious disc.
It also occurs that flying it up the side of a block of flats or a hotel could result in some interesting camera footage.
I think it would be cool to adapt a nerf gun to one of these. It would be great to have aerial wars with several of these. Or, if one wanted some serious marking, paintball guns! :D A good paintball hit might even cause some flight handling challenges but I don't think would necessarily knock the thing out of action.
I guess Israel will have to block the import of LEGO into the Gaza Strip and Palestine now. Otherwise the next thing will be LEGO-copter attacks on settlements. Using a Patriot (or Israeli equivalent) to shoot them down will not be cost effective. The Israelites will either have to infect the flight control system software with some nefarious virus which causes the rotors to overspeed, or else build Israeli LEGO anti-copters which seek out and destroy any other copters with the wrong color pattern.
@Scott Pedigo
I guess Israel will have to block the import of LEGO into the Gaza Strip and Palestine now.
Earlier I was thinking along the lines of CIA-controlled LEGO drones launching a missile strike on a house full of people celebrating a wedding somewhere in Afghanistan.
Ole Christiansen would be turning in his grave.
"......I guess Israel will have to block the import of LEGO into the Gaza Strip and Palestine now....." The Gaza Strip is in Palestine - duh!
".......Otherwise the next thing will be LEGO-copter attacks...." It doesn't look capable of carrying even a grenade so I suspect the jihadis will stick with their usual suicide bomber tactics instead.
"....... on settlements......." There are no settlements in the Gaza Strip, not even the Jewish families that have lived in Gaza since Egyptian times. Duh again!
".....Using a Patriot (or Israeli equivalent) to shoot them down will not be cost effective....." No, but a shotgun would deal with it very well, and probably at far less cost than the Lego kit.
".....The Israelites will either have to infect the flight control system software with some nefarious virus which causes the rotors to overspeed...." Simpler just to jam the weak GPS signal and/or remote control frequencies. Of course, they could always triangulate on the remote radio controller and drop a shell on him, long before the "drone" even crosses the border wire.
".....else build Israeli LEGO anti-copters which seek out and destroy any other copters with the wrong color pattern." We'll, that might be a possibility, seeing as Israel has developed the most technically advanced economy in the Mid East. I suppose the lesson there is winners have Apache gunships whilst losers would have to go buy a Lego kit.
Besides looking cool and being the platform that holds it all together, do they actually do anything lego-specific? Did they use any cogs, weels, axles, anything that warranted using lego?
I know their previous model was based on mindstorms and had some cogwheels in it - dunno about this one though, if not then they could've used something lighter and stronger like metal or plastics as platform.
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