According to a piece on GOOD:
A New Zealand outfit called Martin Aircraft Company is going to start selling commercial jetpacks for about $75,000. They’re 200-horsepower dual-propeller packs that can “reach heights of up to 2,400 metres and top speeds of 60mph” and don’t require a pilot’s license. Look for pill food and robot butlers soon.
[via HacDC mailing list]
Flying into the future: New Zealand company to make personal jet packs
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Fra Fondi, of Hobby Media, writes:
To celebrate the anime “Sora no Otoshimono,” which depicted hundreds of girl’s panties flying like birds, the Japanese company Questioners has produced a series of rubber-band powered Panty Ornithopters. On march 6th these flying pants will be liberated in the skyes of Akihabara during the model rocketry event “Sorafes” (translated “Sky Festival”).
Among the organizers of the event there is an amateur group of aspiring web-livecasters called NKH and Nicotech, an open Internet community of Sunday engineers
I am utterly speechless (and anybody who knows me will understand the rarity of such an occurrence).
Flying Panty Ornithopters!
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While doing research for the next issue of MAKE, I discovered this small company, Centeye, right here in my own Northern, VA backyard. They’re developing vision chips for autonomous robotic aircraft. They have several videos on their site, showing various types of tests. Unfortunately, the videos are in WMV format only, and not on YouTube.
The video screen cap above is of a micro helicopter holding its position using only visual information from a ring of six of Centeye’s ArzPro sensors, mounted in the yaw plane. No gyro is used. Other videos show obstacle avoidance behaviors and the robot fliers taking control if the operator tries to fly them into something. Cool stuff. We’ll have to try and get the engineer behind this to present at a Dorkbot.
Centeye
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We’ve covered George Katz and his water rocket projects here in the past. In this recent video, he shows testing of a lightweight in-line parachute deployment rig, as well as some additional footage of the group’s most recent launch day.
In-line Deployment Mechanism
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Awesome DIY water rockets with drop-away boosters
In the Maker Shed:
MAKE: Volume 05
Our Price: $14.99
Homemade electric vehicles, high-powered water rockets, electricity-generating windmill, jet engine in a jam jar, and a backyard zip line!
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All card-carrying members of the NAR may want to look away now. The West Oakland Rocketry Club, based out of West Oakland CA, breaks pretty much every rule in the NAR Handbook. This is not rocketry for kids, or those who are particularly safety-concerned. Dubbing what they do “art rocketry,” the group (a lot of the same folks associated with the Raygun Gothic Rocketship and the Steampunk Treehouse projects) has built rockets out of everything from frozen turkeys to snow men; Slinkies to Chinese food containers. (How cool is that “nuclear football” style launch control briefcase?)
(see more pics after the jump)
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Tom Wilksch’s Portable Gliding Simulator offers two improvements over a traditional simulator installed in a fixed location. Built on a trailer base, this can be towed to public events to serve as a recruiting tool – offering a taste of soaring to many more people. And since it folds up tidily, it doesn’t require dedicated storage space when not in use.
I love how the aerodynamic cover doubles as a large curved projection screen.
More pictures & info at The Design Blog and at Tom’s entry page for the Australian Design Award.
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When I was about 12 years old, and still living in Dallas, my dad bundled me into the car one day and drove me out to Love Field to meet my great uncle, Troy, who was, at the time, touring the United States, visiting every city named “Troy,” in a light plane he built himself. I remember the way the plywood skin of the plane looked and smelled from the inside. I remember Troy showing us his “auto pilot,” which was a set of three ropes he could loop over the control stick to maintain level flight while he ate a meal. Troy finished his tour and flew back to his home in Alaska, and five years later was killed in a pile-up on a fog-shrouded highway. Troy was something of a maker legend in my family–besides the plane, he built his lakeside geodesic dome-home and all the furniture in it, including a pool table. He built a fleet of canoes–one named for each of his daughters and grand-daughters–to sail on the same lake. He even built the lake itself, or at least the dam that formed it. That afternoon at the airport was the only time I ever met him.
And although I don’t think I’d ever try to build a functional airplane myself, the experience left me with fair-sized soft spot for those who do. So I got a huge kick out of Chuck Gantzer’s page describing the building and flying of his Pietenpol AirCamper NX770CG. The AirCamper was first designed by one Bernard Pietenpol, who in 1928, with no more than an eighth-grade formal education, set out to build a “common man’s airplane” with hardware store and scavenged parts. Today his son and grandson are still selling plans. [via Boing Boing]
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Here’s a video of a scratch-built “foamy” R/C model of a seaplane that can actually take off and land on water. “Foamies” is the name given to the class of model planes built out of the insulation foam that can be found at home/hardware stores.
ModelAero also sells a kit version of this build.
Polaris Seaplane Parkflyer
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The mysterious Jack Crossfire’s open source Vicacopter autonomous VTOL UAVs are amazing to watch. For around a hundred dollars you, too, can build your own.
You need to be an expert in PIC assembly, electronics, & the VicaCopter source code to actually get it to work, but this is actual source code flying our autonomous VTOL aircraft, not an incomplete stage which can’t hover.
The VicaCopter supports 2 configurations:
3 gyros & a sonar transducer for the minimal autopilot
6 DOF IMU, magnetometer, barometer, GPS for the full autopilot
Some things VicaCopter can do:
Can fly with under $100 of parts, not including the airframe.
Automated landing & takeoff
Sonar position sensing for indoor flight
GPS position sensing for outdoor flight
Ground station instrument panel
Untethered communication from pilot to ground station
Fully autonomous missions written in picoC scripting language
Manual altitude & position changes from stick commands
Curved or linear paths
Turning towards a point
Camera trigger
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Twitter user ChristineMMTTM points us to this video record of the process of building a remote control airplane from junk that could be scavenged from most household trash. Projects like this are a great way to learn problem solving, and important concepts of aerodynamics. Could this be done with a full-size class of regular education students?
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