Daredevil Brit lifts off in 54-prop quinquaquadcopter An intrepid Brit has demonstrated the Right Stuff by strapping himself into an improbable but highly pleasing home-built, 54-prop flying contraption. The £6,000 quinquaquadcopter, dubbed by its creator the "Swarm Manned Aerial Vehicle Multirotor Super Drone", uses off-the shelf 18in props and an awful lot of 4-cell LiPos. …
"You want to see daredevils, check out any random Youtube video posted by a Russian or a redneck"
Yes, I'm afraid this alleged daredevil might seem to be a little more methodical and careful, and how can I put this politely, a little less of a fuckwitted lobotomy volunteer gung-ho compared to some other nations' examples.
But the thing is you see, our glorious garden shed boffins have a rather greater chance of passing on their determination and ingenuity to the next generation of unsung heroes, and a rather smaller of a chance doing the gene pool a favour and earning an ignominious Darwin award...
You must feel at least a bit of shame/embarrassment for your last statement here.
You benefit directly from such crackpots. You should be on your knees thanking existence that such out of the box thinkers exist! Shame on you. Ungrateful cave being, wake up and give credit where due.
Agreed, I love the feat. The name I'm not sure about but more because he called it "super drone". I don't think it's still a drone if it has the pilot aboard. I think as configured it's a regular aircraft but if it just carried the occupant as cargo then it could be a drone.
I suppose it could have remote controls that would make it either depending on whether the occupant was holding the remote. Of course in that instance a tether on the remote would be rather handy since dropping it would likely result in some fancy maneuvering as the joysticks get knocked about on hitting the ground.
Agreed on the lame name (goes with the socks?)
How about:
Aeronautic Numerous Gyro Rotating Yawless Battery Energized Eccentric System (ANGRYBEES)
Hovering Overhead Lifting Device Making Yellow Britches Every Effin Ride (HOLDMYBEER)
I'm sure my fellow commentards can do even better.
"has the CAA been advised of this? Does he have a pilots licence? Is the aircraft approved / licenced? Is he insured for public liability - he's in a public park?"
Fsck me. Every time I go to the toilet now I have to do a risk assessment and follow the check list;
Seatbelt on.
Helmet on and pointed towards bowl.
Glasses on in case of splash-back.
Legs braced and back straight to avoid strain injury.
Bloody health and safety!!!
This thing is awesome yet useless, as awesome in its futility as the floppy disk RAID array, yet I love it and will cherish the memory of seeing it.
Floppy RAID array, a whole 4 megabytes of awesome storage potential;
http://macguild.org/raid.html
"Seatbelt on.
Helmet on and pointed towards bowl.
Glasses on in case of splash-back.
Legs braced and back straight to avoid strain injury.
Bloody health and safety!!!"
You're obviously a henpecked husband. Tell her you're a man and WILL pee standing up, and WILL leave the toilet seat up.
Never mind all that worrying...I say more power to the guy.
Typical British pluck...he wanted to do something, no-one was going do it for him so he got off his arse and did it himself, probably learning loads in the process.
Ever tried to do something just to see if you can? I have, and it's one of the most rewarding feelings ever when whatever it is you have attempted to do or make works.
We need more people like him - in the tech. industry, in Britain and in the world.
"Ever tried to do something just to see if you can? I have, and it's one of the most rewarding feelings ever when whatever it is you have attempted to do or make works."
Indeed - but re x 7's comment, I do have a depressing feeling that at some point in the future we'll be reading about how the guy has been fined as a result of doing this.
"... fined as a result of doing this." Yep. Without high-powered coverage up the chain, anything I'd done would of been shutdown upon immediate discovery, end of career for me, yada, yada. However, it's surely the best things I've ever done. May not have better than sex, but close if not equal.
You'd be surprised at how anal the people with very nasal voices that work in local authorities can be.
Things that spring to mind include the fact that he's operating the quinquaquadcopter in a public space - which he would almost certainly have needed permission to do, and (if it was granted) there would have been safety requirements that would very likely include preventing random people from wandering by. The fact that there were random people wandering by leads me to infer that permission wasn't obtained.
So there's a potential fine "on the strength of what we've seen in the video" without even trying to speak (or type) with a nasal voice.
<snip>
"Ok.. maybe not boffinry but parts-filddling."
Nothing like removing the context to make a remark.
Sooooo, what you do in private in your shed should be kept there. What happens in the shed stays in the shed.
I tried some boffinry with my SO in the shed and she was having none of it, so yes after that I did fiddle with some parts.
I wonder if you need a license to operate one of these?
Next step would be to add some controls, or are they just not working very well? If the seat was hanging, then you could control it by shifting your weight around like a glider. Otherwise, if the rotors on the left and right sides are contra-rotating, add a joystick which alters their relative speed on the left-right axis to rotate the copter, and similarly alters the relative speed of the front and back rotors to tilt/move forward and backward.
After that you could compensate for wind-drift - not sure if that can be done using a gyroscope or GPS or something that can measure the ground speed.
Image recognition is cheap and easy now, so just point a camera down and track which way you're moving.
I know there are smaller drones out there that use the system, although a friend was flying his when a small dog wandered underneath, which the system interpreted as being the bit of ground it was tracking and proceeded to follow the dog.
Bonus points if you make it out of an old optical mouse.
No cockpit, but has a cockpit canopy. He understand British weather!
No seat belt or other straps, but he's wearing a crash helmet! Smart man,
And then there's the panicked "Be careful" from the cameraman as he rises a bit higher than planned for shortly after the cameraman ran away from the obviously unskilled pilot flying the hover mower of spinning death straight at him!
All good stuff and great fun, but as someone above already mentioned, the next time we hear of this guy it'll be because some jobsworth has reported him and he'll end up with a fine for flying an experimental aircraft in a public place without a licence :-(
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