DraganFly III Gyro-stabilized RC Helicopter

Pronoun54 writes "It hovers! It spins! It spies! The Draganflyer III weighs just 17 ounces with its high-tech stabilization system. "As an eye in the sky, the Draganflyer III can be used indoors or out, up to a mile away, to take aerial views of real estate, promote products at trade shows, or give the guy in the next cube a close encounter he won't soon forget." "One more advantage of the Draganflyer III: if you're grounded by bad weather, you can still open the throttle and hover indoors." Their site has videos of this thing in action both indoors and out. Seems like it can move pretty fast at top speed." The Times has a piece talking about the piezo gyroscopes (including purty pictures) that the chopper uses to self-stabilize.

Comments

If you're interested..

[Mr2cents]

Here's a project on sourceforge (GPL'ed):

autopilot

Slashdotted, google cache

[jonman_d]

Of course, you won't get the purty pictures:

http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:Zcv7fU8bM28C: www.rctoys.com/draganflyer3.php+&hl=en&ie=UTF- 8

Re:Why NiCd?

[dougmc]

You must not do much R/C :)

NiCd's tolerate high discharge rates better than NiMH batteries, and FAR better than Li-ion batteries. They can also be charged faster.

You can discharge a SCR NiCd battery in four minutes and not damage it. Do that to a NiMH battery, and it'll be too hot to touch, and will be damaged. Try to do that to a Li-ion battery, and you'll ruin it the very first time.

Also, the NiMH and Li-ion batteries have a higher internal resistance. Voltage drop == discharge rate * internal resistance, so as you draw more and more amps, you get fewer and fewer volts. Eventually, you get less total power from the NiMH and Li-ion batteries, even though they have higher capacities.

I doubt these things will fly for much longer than ten minutes (if even that.) You're discharging the batteries at a high rate, so you need batteries that can handle it. And those batteries are NiCd's.

Some park fliers can use Li-ion batteries, and they can stay up for 30-60 minutes at a time. But they fly very slowly and have very little power. Helicopters and other similar vehicles are not so efficient.

Re:Why NiCd?

[dougmc]

I just checked the link -- they only fly for 5 minutes. Definately, they *need* NiCd's to handle that much current draw.

If you were to use NiMH or Li-ion batteries, you'd need much larger ones -- they'd be so large that it couldn't fly with the additional weight.

On the bright side, these NiCd's can probably be charged in 15 minutes. So, if you have four or five battery packs and a good charger, you should be able to keep flying with only short stops to swap out batteries -- the other battery packs will either be cooling or charging (charging hot batteries = bad idea -- great way to ruin them.)

Wow... big heli for $700+

[Critical_]

I have been flying r/c gas-powered, gyro-stabilized helicopters for 8 years now. This is nothing new. Most people can buy a full fledged heli setup for $700 or so. Back about 5 years ago, solid state gyros (piezo gyros) came out and have made the old mechanical gyros seem slow and imprecise. For more info on "real" r/c helicopters here are some links:

http://www.miniatureaircraftusa.com
http://www. century.com
http://www.heliproz.com
http://www.h eli-world.com
http://runryder.com
http://www.fut aba-rc.com
http://www.osengines.com

I fly an X-Cell Graphite 60 size helicopter with a futaba 9zhs (9 channel) computer radio controller, futaba gy601 piezo gyro, OS .61 SX-H engine. Any questions, feel free to ask.

Re:I want one too!

[dougmc]

You think that's expensive?

Check out their Draganflyer X-Pro model.

Here's the google cache.

Only $4997! (no, I didn't miss a decimal point.)