jDrones Report: Beijing Hobby Expo 2012
Beijing Model / Hobby Expo May-2012
jDrones visited on Beijing Hobby Expo this May-2012. Beijing model expo is one of the biggest in mainland China. There are hundreds and hundreds of people around the world visiting on expos every year. This year was not exception. We saw and talked with lot of people from various countries around the world.
It was really pleasant to visit there and to see many of our friends on their exhibition booths. Almost every 5th exhibitor already knew us and greeted us warmly. We also make some new friends on expo area, some will be our members on our global partner network and some will be more closer contacts.
Whole expo area was spread around 3 big halls on Beijing EXPO center. There we not any really big surprise on area. Maybe biggest change on overall was exposure of multicopters and similar devices, almost every 4rd manufacturer had some type of multicopter on their booth.
But in generally whole expo was build around all those traditional areas like:
- Airplanes, Helicopters
- Motors & Servos
- Boats
- Cars
Another thing was battery and motor providers. Those has really big part on this years expo.
So let's first take a look at some of the multicopters over there.
More traditional looking hexa copters..
Generic folding frames was also present. Frame was made mainly from Kite parts
Also there were really small quad copters on Walkera booth. I mean really small :)
And also one really big monster quad. This quad did weight almost 3kg and it had huge 18" propellers, foldable arms and belt-driven power system. All features were integrated their custom made radio.
DJI has their big booth too with all their nice frames and helicopters but we never saw many people on their booth which was a bit of surprise for us.
We also found one possible frame for our new ArduRover line. Let's see what future brings for us. At least this rock crawler looks really great and it's strong. It was size 1/6 full aluminum frame.
Along all those traditional and UAV airplane frames one full RTF Airplane was clearly on top of others. It was just great looking FPV plane. Elegance to the maximum...
This plane had everything what you need to start your FPV career. IT had front camera, flightstabilization, RC controller, OSD. Best of all was the radio, it had it's own video display and possibility to connect even video goggles.
Radio on closeup... This radio and it's camera systems can be easily mounted on helicopters, airplanes and other devices. It works on 2.4Ghz frequency and manufacturer gives range of 1-2km for it.
Other really interesting thing on whole expo was all those great looking nice toys that growing boy just cannot live without. And by toys I mean all great tools what they had.
There were several companies selling Milling machines, Millin/Lathe machines and also small hobby 6-in-1 modular machine sets.
One of my favorite was this miniset that can be easily modified from small lathe to milling machine or even tablesaw. It was looking absolutely amazing piece of work. Every home hobbyist should have at least one set. Even thou we here at jDrones have big CNCs/Laser cutters/Milling machines I personally thing that I need to have one of these sets too (when I get it, I will make detailed review of it).
One nice MUST thing is to have your own personal mini robot. It was even dancing some Shakiras football theme.
Robot had 14 servos, ARM cpu and it did rock while doing pushups/dancing and stretching like old Arnold ;)
That's about it for this year Hobby Expo. Thank you Beijing and see you next year.
Views: 1724
Tags: 2012, Airplanes, Beijing, Expo, Friends, Helicopters, Hobby, Multirotors, Tools, jDrones
-
Comment by Michael Pursifull on May 24, 2012 at 12:23am -
Jani, thanks for a great report. I look forward to hearing more about your future toys tools.
-
Comment by Kirill on May 24, 2012 at 12:55am -
Thank you for the post, Jani! Very interesting!
-
Comment by Marooned on May 24, 2012 at 1:30am -
The Rock Crawler looks great!
-
Moderator Comment by Ruwan on May 24, 2012 at 3:08am -
Thanks Jani, this is great! Do you have any links for Milling/Lathe machines you mentioned?
-
Distributor Comment by Dany Thivierge on May 24, 2012 at 7:17am -
A nice dangerous place to spend time and money!
hehehe Nice one Jani, thanks for the pictures and report.
-
3D Robotics Comment by Chris Anderson on May 24, 2012 at 7:38am -
Great report! I've got one of those Walkera nanoquads and it's awesome (I reviewed it here). We were flying it for two days at the 3D Robotics booth at Maker Faire and it always drew crowds.
And I definitely need to get one of those desktop milling machines!
-
Comment by Ellison Chan on May 24, 2012 at 7:42am -
Nice. It's interesting though that almost all that stuff has already been blog on DIYDrones in the pass couple of months, already.
-
Comment by Tim McGinnes on May 24, 2012 at 8:31am -
In the bottom left of the photo you can see the name of the milling/lathe machine is Unimat 1.
A quick Google search bought up these 2 pages:
http://www.thecooltool.com/produktgruppe.php?language=e&status=...
-
Comment by Ellison Chan on May 24, 2012 at 8:40am
-
The red ones, are on Ebay. I think this is it:
Not sure it's computer controlled.
-
JDrones Comment by Jani Hirvinen on May 24, 2012 at 5:34pm -
Yes they are unimat-1 machines but there seems to be some copies too that are full plastic. I saw both plastic and metal versions on expo. On upper picture (mine) are original metal bory versions of those tools. And yep, ellison your link to original manufacturer is correct.
Dont remember their actual pricelevel but they werent cheap. Ok there seems to be plastic versions of those on market and thise are naturally a lot weaker than originals.
No computer control. The are fully manual gizmoz BUT there is an upgrade set for those and you can make them computer controllable. Well at least some of the models.
They have also "heavyduty" version available and with that you can even cut some small metal parts.
If i am not folly wrong. Basic set was something like 800-1000usd and for metal works it was around double. I will check from my contacts later.
Social Networking
Top Content
Contests
Season Two of the Trust Time Trial (T3) Contest has now begun. The fourth round is an accuracy round for multicopters, which requires contestants to fly a cube. The deadline is April 14th.A list of all T3 contests is here.
Groups
-
Agricultural UAVs
134 members
-
Moderators
24 members
-
Documentation Editors
51 members
-
ArduRover User Group
185 members
-
ArduCopter User Group
1298 members
Advertisement
© 2013 Created by Chris Anderson.
Powered by
You need to be a member of DIY Drones to add comments!
Join DIY Drones