Posted on 03/14/2012 9:41:52 PM PDT by bigbob
Jordi Munoz had no training. Scant schooling. Little money. He also had a video-game console and nothing else to do.
So he built his own drone.
A Mexican native, Mr. Munoz married an American citizen and moved to Riverside,Calif., in 2007. While waiting for his green card, the 21-year-old was marooned in his apartment, unable to work, attend school or obtain a driver’s license.
On the other hand, he had an Internet connection. A Nintendo Wii. A radio-controlled toy helicopter his mother had given him to help kill time.
Tinkering with the Wii’s control wand and a $60 gyroscope he had purchased on eBay, he modified the helicopter to fly itself, just like the $5 million Predator unmanned aerial vehicles deployed by the U.S. military.
Five years later, Mr. Munoz is co-founder and CEO of 3D Robotics, a San Diego-based company that has 18 employees and earned more than $300,000 in revenue in December producing components for hobbyist drones.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Thanks to the iPhone and Wii for creating demand that has driven the price of GPS chips, miniature navigational sensor packages and complete IMUs to the point where a Household Drone is not only feasible, but quite likely within the next 10 years.
I want to be able to call my order into the local store and have my UAV fly over and pick it up, so it need to be able to handle a large pizza sized payload!
I wonder if I will live to see remote control helicopters declared illegal.
At first they seem cute and fun, then all of a sudden their potential becomes apparent.
Thanks for posting this! I need it for my...um...project. That would be the one I put up on a thread, but it got yanked by the mods for being “loose lips”...(no point in objecting). IMO, my thread was “forewarned is fore-armed!” regarding UAVs.
How much are they to be permitted in the airspace over a private residence or business?
How much clearance do they need to give traffic helicopters, emergency helicopters, and other HUMAN carrying air traffic?
Do they ever notify the FAA of their flight plans?
As for violating FAA rules, how are you going to catch the remote-control operator sitting in his van looking at a computer display?
I wonder if the little helicopters can be made to fly silently.
Sure: as soon as their rotors stop moving air. ;-)
$300K in revenue with 18 employees? That’s spreading it pretty thin.
ping to Yikes!
A comment on the Wash Times story
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/mar/14/out-of-hobby-class-drones-lifting-off-for-personal/
“Just consider a recent episode of NCIS in which a satellite bouncing electric impulse triggered an natural appearing heart attack in a Naval Petty Officer. Could the same have happened to Andrew Beitbart, just think hovering drone following him home from that bar (perhaps he had been slipped something in his drink that would react as an apparent heart attacked if shocked by an electric beam from a drone).”
The Naval Petty officer had a pacemaker which was supposedly remotely accessed to re-program it to increase said officer’s heartbeat to 400bpm. That did not appear “natual” to Ducky.
Andrew Breitbart did not have a pacemaker.
Fear not, unless you have a pacemaker.
What we’ll need is a little backyard motion-sensing defense system to shoot down any neighbor’s drones that stray in. Or— better yet— string some hot wires high over the backyard like a great big bug-zapper. :-)
Coming soon: mini-copter exterminators.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.