Flone, a drone for social innovation

Hi DIY Community,

I would like to share this video with some of the things we've done in one year of development of the project flone.

Flone is a platform that makes smartphones able to fly... and much more.

 

You can select english subtitles for the few spanish sentences in the video.

Last year we won the call Next things:Next Space 2013, by Laboral Art Center and Telefónica I+D. Was a six months artistic residency where we develop the airframe, android control software and documentation.

By building a DIY, low cost platform that makes smartphones able to fly we pretend to engage people in the use of public airspace, giving them the opportunity to participate on the reshaping of the airspace concept from a first person point of view. Since it is very difficult to have an opinion about something you have never used, it is very important to provide the tools that society needs to engage on the regulation of this space.

Flone is a laser-cut wood quadcopter with an open-source Arduino Flying board (Multiwii). The copter can use the camera, GPS, Bluetooth and Wifi of the smartphone for taking pictures and connecting to another smartphone as a ground station.
For the frame we have developed a parametric model without nuts or bolts, what makes easier to assembly and handle woods of different thickness without tools.

The electronic components are sticked together forming what we call the “electric skeleton” and it is attached to the wood-frame with zip ties. With this system we can easily repair a flone after a crash and move the electric skeleton from a broken frame to a new one in minutes, making a lot easier and cheap the experimentation and development.
Flone uses a new way of control a multicopter: it follow the movements of the smartphone of the pilot.

Buying the components from Hobbyking it costs around $143 without shipment.

3689612967?profile=originalFlone Remote available in Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=processing.test.floneremote

E-mail me when people leave their comments –

You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!

Join diydrones