A fan of ‘Star Wars’, Adam Woodworth builds a FPV Speeder Bike Quadcopter Drone.
Adam Woodworth, MIT graduate and an engineer by profession is also a great fan of Star Wars and has actually build a real “Working series of functioning Quadcopter Drones” inspired by the toy speeder bike which appears in the Star Wars series “Return of the Jedi”. Since childhood Woodworth had been engaged in the making of a radio controlled vehicle body, just as a hobby and he seems to have combined his hobby and his love for the favorite classic movie into a reality. He actually acquired a Hasbro toy manufactured in 1999 from online ebay store and then started building his drone.
Woodworth gave a detailed version of the making of the drone to “Make”. The biggest challenge faced by Woodworth was to build a Quadcopter that can lift itself however he did not want to make it look like just a big quad rotor tacked on and hence he did some experiments with different rotor layouts using CAD i.e. computer aided designing. As per Woodworth: “I ended up settling on a layout of four 7? rotors, driven by 880kv 28mm motors. These motors typically spin 10? or 11? two-blade props on an 11.1v Lipo, so to make up for the reduction in diameter I used 3 bladed propellers, running on a 14.4v 2200mAh Lipo. It’s not the most efficient setup, but it keeps the quad compact, and lets me lift the heavier than usual frame.”  The next challenge was the Speed bike rider’s weight which was too much for the drone to carry hence he had to make some changes to the bike rider. By using old Nerf darts, pipe cleaners, and 6mm carbon tubes Woodworth created a custom skeleton for the bike rider; 3DRobotics PixHawk provided the control over the drone. The drone weighs 475 grams and the rider now weighs about 15 gram. The boot and the legs are tied to the drone hence it is not sucked into the rotor. The rotors are mounted on 10 mm carbon tubes which extends from the speed biker’s sides.
The overall weight that the drone can carry is 600 grams. Hence, now Woodworth also thought of adding a FPV (First Person View) radio controlled camera to a Styrofoam ball which can be fitted in the helmet of the bike rider. Now the entire real Working Speeder Bike drone is ready and for any true Star Wars fan this could be an exhilarating experience with the FPV, as this puts the user in the driver’s seat to get exposed to the view as the drone cuts through the air in an open park.
This isn’t the first time that Stars Wars inspired someone to create some innovative piece of work, in the month of February Inquisitr reported that a fan created a Millennium Falcon drone and posted a video of the same to You Tube. The same person recently also constructed a drone in the shape of a TIE Interceptor.
Amazing to see that people can actually bring an imagination to reality with the help of technology.
