Amazon Ends California Drone Deliveries While Expanding To Arizona

When Amazon started its Prime Air drone delivery service in 2022, it had picked College Station (Texas) and Lockeford (California) as its the first areas where the service would be offered. Two yea…

ESP-Drone: Building An ESP32-Based Quadcopter For Not Much Cash

What’s the cheapest quadcopter you can build? As [Circuit Digest] demonstrates with their variant of the ESP-Drone project by Espressif, you only need a minimum of parts, with at the core an …

Got To Go Fast: The Rise Of Super-Fast FPV Drones

Generally when one considers quadcopter drones, the term ‘fast’ doesn’t come to mind, but with the rise of FPV  (First Person View) drones, they have increasingly been designed to…

Can’t Disable DJI Drone ID? Spoof It With An ESP!

We have been alerted to a fun tool, a DJI DroneID spoofer software for ESP8266/ESP32 and some other popular MCUs. Last year, we’ve told you about DJI DroneID — a technology DJI added to…

Extreme Waterproof 3D Prints

Since the crew at [CPSdrone] likes to build underwater drones — submarines, in other words — they need to 3D print waterproof hulls. At first, they thought there were several reasons fo…

A Deep Dive Into Quadcopter Controls

In the old days, building a quadcopter or drone required a lot of hacking together of various components from the motors to the batteries and even the control software. Not so much anymore, with qu…

Mega-CNC Router Carves Styrofoam Into A Full-Size Flying Delorean

When you own an enormous CNC router, you’ve got to find projects that justify it. So why not shoot for the sky — literally — and build the 1980s-est possible thing: a full-scale f…

Drone Motion Capture, The Open Source Way

If you want to do some really advanced flying with drones, you typically need to be able to track them in space. [Joshua Bird] has whipped up a drone tracking system that can do the job for as litt…

Variable-Nozzle Ducted Fan Provides Fluid Dynamics Lessons

Any student new to the principles of fluid dynamics will be familiar with Bernoulli’s principle and the Venturi effect, where the speed of a liquid or gas increases when the size of the condu…

Stretching The Flight Time On A Compressed Air Plane

[Tom Stanton] has been experimenting with compressed air motors on model aircraft for a good few years, but keeping them aloft (and intact) for more than a few seconds has proven a tough nut to cra…

3D Printed Mini Drone Test Gimbal

Drones are a pain, especially mini ones. When you are designing, building (or even reviewing) them, they inevitably fly off in some random direction, inevitably towards your long-suffering dog, hit…

Control Tricks For Tailsitters

An RC VTOL aircraft always makes for a compelling project, but ensuring the transition between hover and forward flight can be quite challenging. In the video after the break, [Nicholas Rehm] demys…

Autonomous Racing Drones Are Starting To Beat Human Pilots

Even with all the technological advancements in recent years, autonomous systems have never been able to keep up with top-level human racing drone pilots. However, it looks like that gap has been c…

Tiny Drone Racing Gate Records Your Best Laps

Professional drone racing is now an elite sport, with all the high-end tech, coverage, and equipment that goes along with it. If you’re just practicing with tiny drones in your home though, y…

Automated Drone Takes Care Of Weeds

Commercial industrial agriculture is responsible for providing food to the world’s population at an incredibly low cost, especially when compared to most of human history when most or a major…

Formation Flying Does More Than Look Good

Seeing airplanes fly in formation is an exciting experience at something like an air show, where demonstrations of a pilot’s skill and aircraft technology are on full display. But there are o…

Fly Like You Drive With This Flying RC Drift Car

So it’s 2023, and you really feel like we should have flying cars by now, right? Well, as long as you ignore the problem of scale presented by [Nick Rehm]’s flying RC drift car, we pret…

UAV Flight Controller Saves Weight

When building autonomous airborne vehicles like drones or UAVs, saving a little bit of weight goes a long way, literally. Every gram saved means less energy needed to keep the aircraft aloft and ul…

Drone Flies For Five Hours With Hydrogen Fuel Cell

Multirotor drones have become a regular part of daily life, serving as everything from camera platforms to inspection tools and weapons of war. The vast majority run on lithium rechargeable batteri…

Patent Spat Leaves DJI Owing Textron $279M

Patents are the murky waters where technical jargon and legalese meet, and in this vast grey area of interpretation, DJI now owes Textron $279M. At issue in the case were two patents issued to Text…