From Hackaday:
KATSU, Dan Moore, and Adafruit’s Becky Stern are trying to perfect a flying can of spraypaint, and they’ve met with some success and surely many broken props.
The team used an Iris+ for this project instead of the Phantom used by [KATSU] earlier this year, but the principle of the entire endeavor remains the same: fly up against a wall, flick a switch, and watch paint come out of a spray gun. To get the can spraying paint, they modified a can gun to accept a micro servo. This servo is connected to the trigger mechanism of the can gun, and the entire unit is slung under the quad.
Getting a quadcopter to put paint exactly where you want it is hard, even indoors. Luckily, the Pixhawk inside the Iris has sensor inputs and an ‘altitude hold’ mode that can accept a sonar sensor and can be programmed to stay a set distance away from a wall. These sensors are susceptible to interference, and a proper, shielded cable had to be made, but the sensor did work.
Flying the quad did not go as smoothly. The swinging can of paint changes the center of gravity of the quad, and even flying indoors proved difficult. Still, if you’d like to give it a go, [Becky] put up the instructions for their build. You can see the hover attempts in the video below.
Comments
A wise man once said "Practice flying skills before trying to paint" . This is a cool idea...I would find a way to put the nozzle on some form of rail so it is 12 inches past the props and a smaller can.
Nikola can you tell me where I can find that small sprayers? thank's
It's clearly a rattle can. If it were for pesticides, there are lots of small, battery-powered sprayers available at Home Depot. Even if this thing were stable, the rotor wash would blow the paint everywhere.
Hmmm Weed killer - grass ? :) ...
Perhaps the results in the video aren't the best but it's a good perfectible idea not only for paint, It's looks usefull to control insects on high or unaccesible structures, perhaps with a bigger cuad not to umbalance it, thank's for share.
what about sky writing with color smoke? More socially comforting.
Call me a fuddy duddy but I'm glad this doesn't work. We're having a hard enough time getting society at large to tolerate UAVs as they are. Unmanned Aerial Graffiti will only piss off people with the power to regulate the rest of us into the ground.
A little bit sad to watch... so many crashes... but i hope they will manage to pull it off.