By Evan Ackerman
IEEE SPECTRUM
There's been a bunch of drone stuff going on this week, and we thought that it might be easiest for you (and for us) to toss it all at you at once. It's sort of like Video Friday, except Drone News Thursday. And no, this will not be a recurring feature (I hope), so enjoy it while it lasts.
The more drones there are flying around over our heads, the more likely it is that some of those drones will, for whatever reason, fall out of the sky. This is bad for the drones, but probably worse for anyone directly underneath them.
Drone maker DJI has come up with a drone-mounted parachute deploying system that can drop your expensive aerial investment gently (ish) to the ground in the event of an emergency:
Here are the specs we've been able to dig up on the DJI DropSafe (which hasn't been officially released yet):
- Compatible with DJI S1000, S800 EVO, and S800 systems
- Compatible with DJI A2 and WooKong-M flight control systems
- Supports command inputs from RC transmitters
- An independent RC control channel is reserved for parachute deployment. Additionally, a backup battery safeguards the system, so if the main battery fails, users can still deploy the parachute manually.
- Automatically cuts off motor power when parachute is deployed
- Payload – Speed of descent
- 3 kg – 4.4 m/s
- 6 kg – 5.6 m/s
- 9 kg – 6.8 m/s
- 12 kg – 8.6 m/s
- 15 kg – 11.7 m/s
Important: The DJI DropSafe parachute is designed to minimize damage to equipment in the event of an accident. However, no guarantee can be made that all damage will be prevented. Use with caution.
The chute is reusable, and the entire system weighs about 550 grams. It'll deploy itself in half a second, which makes it effective at altitudes as low as 6 meters.
"Coming soon," whatever that means.
Article here: DJI DropSafe
Comments
I agree with Pedals2Paddles, what happens if the multi is inverted? It doesn't make any sense that DJi put his parachute on the top of the multi. I think that Opale made the best choice by putting its system on the bottom of the aircraft, which can face to different flight situations that you could encounter.
http://www.opale-paramodels.com/index.php/fr/shop/parachute-de-seco...
Thanks for the weekly wrap ups Thomas.
Always interesting.
Mathieu
I find it funny that it took this long for someone to manufacture a parachute system like this. I have been planning to make one using an aTTiny85 and an accelerometer, with a simple spring loaded tube for the ejection, just haven't gotten around to it. (time, money, college, car.... etc.) It would be really cheap to make, $50 at most, assuming you don't have any random parts laying around. The logic is pretty simple as well. If the sum of all the accelerations is smaller than a certain threshold for a second or two, pop the chute.
Anyone have any reasoning as to why we haven't seen more of these before?
(Unfortunately this did happen to one of our SnowBird show-team pilots)
My question here is what happens if the aircraft is inverted when the chute deploys. I have this feeling it wouldn't work out very well.
DJI deserves it. In fact it is very necessary for DJI. But I don't think it fits DJI's flying-away bug.
hmm interesting but 550g ?? that's heavy
I can't really figure out why it weights so much ?? Does it use chemical propelants to deploy or pressurised gas ?