Good news: APM 2 preorders have reopened. You can now choose it with the onboard GPS or without, so can use an external GPS or any other supported GPS module (the Ublox GS406/407 can be used with…

Wow. Florian did his own motor controllers, RC (via Xbee) and everything else. From Hackaday: 

We think [FlorianH] did a bang-up job of …

Another cool one from Hackaday today.

[Frank] managed to pull together an impressive collection of features when developing the project. First off, the quadcopter itself uses all-PCB…

Check out those flips! From Hackaday: 

Straight from the Aerospace Controls Laboratory comes a variable-pitch quadrocopterdesigned by [Mark Cutler] and [Jonathan P. Howe].…

Not legal yet in the US without a COA, but apparently allowed in Australia. FromMakezine:

The emerging story of entrepreneurs using drones to provide marketable…

If your UAV is big enough to carry a DLSR, here's a great way to control the lens. From Hackaday:

[Vladimir] built …

From Robots.net:

This image is not cgi or a miniature; it is a real mountain slope where artist Sonja Hinrichsen created this beautiful pattern simply by walking in circles. The robotic perspective of this concept is the way the photos and the video were shot, not by a helicopter but by a…

The New York Times invited some policy analysts to debate the issues surrounding the introduction of drones into the domestic airspace. Not a lot new here, but interesting to see this reach the mainstream media. 

You can read the whole thing …

ABC News Australia has a thorough piece on the state of "drone journalism", which gives some good examples and cuts through the sort of silliness that characterized some earlier reports, such as those…

Sorry to see this. It was a beautiful bird (see below). It used the AttoPilot autopilot. 

From the team's Twitter feed: 

We had an RC Lockout in…

From Hackaday:

[Jouni] sent in his quadrocopter build that was inspired by the Japanese spherebot we…

John Robb has a great post which riffs on the Harvard work we wrote about last year on "pop-up fabrication" of micro flyers (shown in the video above).

The FAA currently estimates that there will be 30,000…

Ryan Calo, a Stanford law professor who specializes in the legal implications of new technologies, published an article the Stanford Law Review in December that I've only just now read. It's very interesting and worth reading the…

"Unmanned Drones go from Afghanistan to Hollywood". A few small errors, but otherwise pretty sound. Excerpts:

This past January, the Los Angeles Police Department…

From the Times and Democrat newspaper in South Carolina:

A remote-controlled aircraft owned by an animal rights group was reportedly shot down near Broxton Bridge Plantation Sunday.

Steve Hindi, president of SHARK (SHowing Animals Respect and Kindness), said his group was preparing to launch its Mikrokopter…

From Makezine:

Forbes blogger TJ McCue sent us a link to this awesome Kinect project with gesture-controls an S107 RC Helicopter. The builder, cdoughty29 on YouTube, writes:

The…

Famous author and public intellectual Francis Fukuyama, ("End of History", etc) is now a DIY Droner! He's blogging his project here. He's just doing a RC quad now, but no doubt now that he's got the bug he'll be shooting for more "real drone" things soon…

Here's a fun competition between a KK navboard quad and one flying the Ardupirates version of the ArduCopter code. They're set to the same GPS position hold target and then, well, watch the video....Very dramatic ending!

As is customary and traditional, we celebrate every new 1,000 members here and share the traffic stats. This time it's 22,000!

There were more than 1.33 million page views this month, which is a record. It just took us four weeks to get this latest 1,000 members--we're averaging about one new member…

I was on NPR's Science Friday yesterday talking about drones, along with "Wired for War" author Peter Singer and MIT unmanned systems professor Missy Cummings.  You can hear it here. And welcome all the listeners who are new members…