Rob's Hangar

i just made some outdoor video with an onboard 5.9 Gramm Spycam board. Total weight of the 4#3B with video is about 62 gramms. Around 4-5 mins of flight time. it feels a bit heavy.

i used a 4GB 20$ Spycam that comes as a pen. removed the “pen” and used only the PCB/Board. Its fun. i need to get the camera angle more upwards – a little bit to much grass in the vids, but some people to.

where to get the cam, just google spycam pen, amazon, ebay, you can get them anywhere.

The camera needs to be cut, the pcb taken out, the camera lipo needs to be removed and powerd by the heli lipo. and the sensor-chip needs to be brought to an 90° angle.

The Norwegian company Prox Dynamics just released videos of their PD-100 Black Hornet, a 15 gramm fixed-pitch helicopter with a direct drive brushless main motor. According to Prox Dynamics, the PD-100 is the first Unmaned Aircraft System (UAS) to be developed.

The copter comes in a box of three (always better to have more than one heli!).

Just too bad that this machine will probably never be available for the regular guy.

RTF box - millitary style.

more

The box.

The PD-100 has a rotorspan of 100mm. With a weight of 15g it is about as lightweight as a PicooZ.

• Rotor Span 100 mm, Mass 15 gr including Payload
• Maximum Speed 10 m/s, Endurance up to 30 minutes
• Digital Data Link, Range 1000 m Line-of-Sight
• GPS Navigation or Visual Navigation through Video
• Autopilot with Autonomous and Directed Modes
• Hover & Stare, Automatic Search Patterns, Preplanned Route

Videos:

Interestingly the PD-100 tailrotor looks very similar to the PicooZ tailrotor.

Direct drive brushless mainmotor - and a tail rotor that looks very much like the PicooZ's?

The PD-100 has a direct-drive brushless main motor which can be seen in the picture above.  Eliminating the gear/pinion components from the design makes it very low in noise i suppose. Also the weight of the BL main motor is placed directly in the desired center of gravity.

Really a palm-size design. The rotor looks flybar-less. Do I see a PicooZ tail?

Looking at the picture above there seems to be no mechanical stabilizing mechanism like a flybar in the main rotor design. So this flybar-less setups seems to be stabilized by electronics. Also in the picture the swashplate can be seen – it has relatively large diameter: This makes controll inputs extremly precise (high resolution) – just what is needed for a flybar-less design at this scale.

One of the servos can be seen in the back of the heli, near the tailboom – looking like linear servos used on the Spektrum AR6400 or the 5-1 board of Walkera 4#3Q and Lama2.

With camera. Palm-Size FPV - PD-100 C Prototype

Also interesting are the other, earlier designs of Prox Dynamics’ Peter Murren which can be seen on his website http://www.proxflyer.com/.

Videos from 2008:

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