Video Fly With the Brooklyn Aerodrome (Video) 22
Brett: I‘ve come down here to present my airplanes, this is called the Flack, it’s a flat plate airplane built out of mixtures of trash, recycled stuff and we have coat hangers involved; well, let’s go through the parts.
Tim: Sure.
Brett: So this is the battery pack which powers the speed controller, and the speed controller connects to the receiver and to the motor right here and very nicely the speed controller powers this receiver, which talks to the transmitter here, and this transmitter controls these servos and the motor. And if you look at this young lady’s hair as I do this, you’ll see exactly how much power it has. So, that’s pretty cool. So it’s my favorite kind of airplane, it’s really over-powered, but it’s very maneuverable, it has very large control surfaces.
Tim: How over-powered, describe?
Brett: It's a 1-to-1 power to weight ratio. This generates about a pound of thrust, this weighs about a pound, so it’s like an F-16. And flies awesome and it’s meant to be very tough. This one has been crashed, I don’t know, 20 times. It has been hitting this curb all day yesterday with all the wind.
Tim: But it’s still flyable?
Brett: It’s totally flyable. We’ll fly it shortly. And the basic idea is that we make a very tough easy-to-build airplane. You can build this in about 3.5, 4 hours; if you’ve got everything together you know how to work with stuff, may be a little longer if it’s new, cutting and stuff like that. But all I have to do is just cut, may be a little bit of soldering if you’re doing your own stuff, bend some coat hangers, what else do we have? Yep, no, it’s pretty robust. And the general idea is build these, fly them in all kinds of conditions, and send us pictures of them. There is various ways we can support you and everything is for free on the website, brooklynaerodrome.com and it’s nice here, you can remember that.
But if you need some support, you can go to – if are a Make magazine subscriber, we’re the cover article for Volume 30. If you need more help, there is a book where the first 5 chapters in this book go into how to build this airplane and the rest of it is how to build your own airplane and just to give you some inspirations of things that I’ve built, but I don’t want you to build my airplanes, I want you to build your own. But you can do things like I've built a banana. I've built a strawberry. I’ve built a carrot. So all these kind of crazy airplanes. So build your own things, send us a picture. So you want to see it fly?
Tim: Sure, but tell me one more thing? What is the origin of Brooklyn Aerodrome ?
Brett: Well,it was an art project for Burning Man and I wanted to take 50 of these and hang some electro-luminescent and wire off of them, have them fly there, but I needed something that was very tough, robust, cheap to build, quick to build and handled wind really well because it always blows hard out in the Nevada desert and the result was a completely failed art project but a really nice design and we probably will be coming up on 2,000 of these having been built. So, it’s worked out extraordinarily well as a way for kids and adults, older kids, really, to learn to fly RC airplanes.
Tim: Well, let’s see you fly.
Brett: Alright, let’s give it a minute. Alright, this is a buddy box setup, so you will see me flying with kids in a second, but here we go. Up, down, left, right, okay. So that’s up, down, left, right, launching. There you go. There I’m bringing in close. All right, here we go. I am going to catch it, I am going to try to catch it, let’s see what happens, landing, oh didn’t succeed. I stalled.
Female Speaker: Can I maybe try?
Brett: Yeah, how old are you?
Female Speaker: I’m nine.
Male Speaker: So, am I.
Brett: Alright, I’ll take nine-year old. Let’s try it again, let’s see if we can get the landing right. Alright here we go, heads up, launching, hold on. Alright, here we go, clear out guys, don’t get around me. Alright, we try this again, alright, ready? And we’re going, kids clear out the way, I am going to land it. This is always fun. That’s a little hot. Anyway... build it, and send me a picture of what you build.
It's a (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:It's a (Score:5, Insightful)
piece of crap with propellor
That's the interesting part.
This is what engineering is about: meeting a need cost effectively. The point of a toy RC airplane is to have fun. Traditionally it was expensive fun that didn't last very very long before you crashed. Having fun for longer with less $$ outlay == better engineering.
Re: (Score:2)
Mod parent up. This thing is great!
yep, crashing traditional RC is expensive, and com (Score:2)
Indeed, this approach is interesting to me because I had to get out of RC planes due to the cost of crashing, especially while I was first learning to fly. Anything that allows one to recover from a crash with just a few dollars and a few minutes is a win.
This approach reminds me of a popular design that is also inexpensive, but this new design has two advantages. First, it positions the motor and prop in the center, where it is protected from damage. Second, they mount the electrical components on
Dizzybird (Score:1)
If you want something a little more aerodynamic, check out the Dizzybird. [modellflug-videos.de] It's designed as a glider [youtube.com] with an actual aerodynamic profile, but you can add a motor as well and enjoy it as a motor glider [youtube.com], or race it like a rocket (60mph no problem) if you prefer. There's even a video of a Dizzybird with an actual rocket. [youtube.com]
1:1 power to weight ratio (Score:2)
One milliwat : one kilotonne? How can it get off the ground?
Re: (Score:1)
For aircraft it's common to measure power as thrust (SI: N) rather than as rate of doing work (SI: W=J/s=Nm/s). Weight is of course thrust due to gravity. So the ratio makes complete sense once you get over the odd definition of power. The 1:1 power:weight ratio then implies that if you hold the thing pointing straight up at full throttle and release it, it will hover. It's almost a helicopter. It doesn't need aerodynamic lift from the wings; it throws back enough air from the prop to keep it up. This isn't
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... It's almost a helicopter. It doesn't need aerodynamic lift from the wings; it throws back enough air from the prop to keep it up. This isn't particularly odd for a model aircraft, especially a very light one.
There was an old saying among the R/C model airplane flyers:
If you put a "60" on a Brick, it would fly.
"60" being a standard 0.60 Inch^3 Glo engine using Methanol and Nitro-methane fuel. Small but with an appalling amount of power, and capable of cutting fingers of the unwary. (For those of you who have never seen a real R/C engine. And get off my lawn!) 8-)
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I am on Slashdot! Holy crap! I am so excited!
Nice to see that even Apu reads /.
Strat
Shrug... (Score:1)
Anyone into RC has seen this stuff for quite while now, built from everything this kid uses to Dollartree foam.
Nothing new.
https://www.youtube.com/result... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)