Blogs

Hi all. Several of us working on the ETH Flying Machine Arena have been watching DIY Drones for a while but we've never really participated in any way. Since our work is somewhat related and might be of interest, we thought we'd post something:

So, it's been a busy year. Many new little quads as well as people joining our team. Many projects, many crashes, many improvements, probably as many new bugs :-) I'd love to give you statistics on flight hours, distance, etc, but we don't keep track of it. Like Drew Carey said on Whose Line, "the points don't matter". :-) (*whoosh* goes the reference)

For Christmas/New Years we decided to do something fun -- take a random absurd idea and see if we can make it fly -- something that people would look at and wonder "why???"... here's our shot (don't miss the ending! :-) ).

This was done on a late Friday night in about 3 hours from placing a piano in the Arena to the final shot... it's *not* a serious research project :-) (at least not yet!!). As it turns out, the keys are quite bouncy, and the quadrotor is quite light, so it was difficult to get it to hold the keys -- this is the main reason for the slowed down tempo.