If he’s wired all the motors in each quad to the same output of the flight controller, or to a common set of batteries, all the motors in each quad would fail together.
But he appears to be an adult, so I’m cool with it.
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I don’t think he’s a viable Darwin award candidate since the drone didn’t kill him or make him sterile. Maybe next year??
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Wow, thank you for the link. I’ve never heard of him before, which was clearly a major gap in my knowledge. He was even an early preceder of the open hardware movement (quoting from the Wikipedia page):
“His conviction that aviation would usher in an era of worldwide peace and prosperity led him to freely publish his designs and forgo patenting his various innovations.”
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Safety Bikini will be the name of my punk band.
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This puts to rest the question whether you could be carried off by a swarm of angry bees.
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You beat me to it… if it’s a mad contraption, Colin Furze has already made at least one!
But there is someone else on this bandwagon, and they are well ahead:
I believe it can be used as a drone if needed: no pilots.
Damn, now I want one.
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He lands back in exactly the same spot. I did not notice for a second that the video had looped.
“Darwin Award candidate” could apply to everyone prior to the Wright brothers. It could have applied to them as well since they did have their own mishaps. But its hard to say if this guy is advancing human knowledge or just being a goofball. This isnt quite the same as someone who brainstorms “hey, we could use the shop vac to siphon this gasoline faster!”
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Safety Bikini is about as safe as your standard bikini battle armor.
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Since it uses a large number of independent rotors, it could probably still gracefully descend if one or more fails (up to a point). Control mechanism may remain a single point of failure, but perhaps redundancy has been built in to handle failover (like backup controllers in the pilot’s pockets or something).
Aside from that, thinking of safety improvements is more fun that starting work, so…
One of those airbag motorcycle outfits and a helmet would be a good thing to add, as long as altitude remains low. Not sure what the ceiling of the thing is; a parachute could be called for if it can reach significant altitude.
Mythbusters tested this out a few years ago. Basic consumer drones have plastic propellers that bend when they hit practically anything. You’d get a nasty bruise, but probably no blood.
Bigger and more expensive drones have much stiffer carbon fibre blades, and they can cut flesh. You would get a nasty gash, which could be fatal if hit you in just the wrong place, but it wouldn’t make it through the bone to amputate a finger.
Chainsaw protective clothing (which fluffs up when it’s cut, in order to bind the blade), would probably be best, but motorbike leathers would probably work fine. Eye and face protection would be a must though.
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I read that as Mariah Carey and I was like wow, who knew? Still pretty damned impressive and brave of her!
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+1 for the apt reference and also distilling how I feel about an oblivious species comforted by a floating blonde
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I’ve been following this guy’s project for years. He’s awesome. Rather than commenting on things you know nothing about, you too might have learned about all the design, fabrication, and testing that brought him this far. And you might also have learned why he was flying in his backyard, rather than in his normal test field.
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Here’s the original video where the clip comes from:
This is episode number 30 for this particular project spanning several years. It is not the first flight of this machine - that happened two years prior, and was preceded by remote-controlled tests. He’s flying in the backyard here because he needs to discharge the batteries before storage, but other test flights were conducted either in some remote park or in a proper airfield.
In short, this appears to be a genuine Wonderful Thing, and not at all a Darwin award nomination.
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You certain about that?
Not seeing many helmets, seatbelts, or other safety gear there.
Admittedly, they weren’t in a suburban backyard, but that’s because the magic to liftoff vertically hadn’t been invented yet. (Neither were the “suburbs” for that matter, but I digress.)
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Which was my point - they did it in a big, open, empty space where they weren’t going to run into anything (or anyone). This guy has barely enough open space to land the thing. And protective gear wasn’t available then, but it sure as heck is now, so not wearing it now isn’t the same as not wearing it then.
At 0:38 it kinda sounds like the intro to War Ensemble.
Thanks for the context! I was thinking it would be horrible to have someone like this for a neighbor (just due to the noise, I bet they’d be fun to talk with), so it’s nice to see that he is also generally conscientious on that front.
What a cool hobby!
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At least we know he hasn’t been drinking.
