everybody's norm from tested here once again at Bay Area Maker Faire meeting up
with Adam Woodworth Adam how you doing Brad having fun even in the rain yeah
it's a little bit rainy outside but thankfully all the drone stuff is
happening indoors and if you've seen our past videos seen Adams videos you make
some incredible custom drones this is amazing is of course Lego copy you have
the original copter here is probably six or seven years old it was from that
International Jetport set as a hair poor with a little jet it was always my
favorite of the helicopters and a couple years ago I did the big lego airplane
yeah and I wanted to do something there's a little less stressful to fly
so I put this guy together okay so a couple things wants all about one just
fabrication right this is scaled up how many times the size of minifigs scale so
this is 10x minifig scale and it works out nice so that you have one instant
relation foam with a couple pieces of depron foam which is like what they used
to make those indoor aerobatic airplanes yes so you got very lightweight sturdy
rigid fabrication wise a lot of curves here very neat as this all bandsaw is it
cnc'd how did you make this it's mostly laser-cut so there's a bunch of free
Lego CAD programs so I made a 3d model of this and then pulled all the 2d
surfaces off of it so I could do all the cuts and then assemble it like a paper
model basically even have the full minifig inside that is so cool I see the
light boat in right there that's really clever
okay so fabricated this together of course it needed to this rotates oh my
god Wow how does it all fly yeah so obviously
like a big square blade is not gonna produce a ton of lift so the the rotor
up top is just kind of decorative but I wanted to make it spin so there's a
little propeller on here that pulls it around slowly as it's flying around and
then the actual lift comes from a quadrotor that's kind of hidden in the
legs you design systems are untraditional using multi rotor ray like
this is quadrotor now how much testing or how much calibration is needed so the
stable so I did a fair amount of tuning before I painted it I'd like to put the
little guy in it and did all the details modern kind of quad flight controllers
are pretty good out of the box so it's just kind of tweaking it to match the
dynamics to the aircraft then you're all good but I always have a rule that I
never like do all the detailing on something until I've proven that it
flies so you don't need to like add weight in a certain place change the
center of gravity much the controller's gonna I mean this is light enough that
the whole thing's only about four pounds so for something this size the dynamics
are pretty slow very very cool uh what other projects are you working on I see
on your Instagram AJ would peace you guys have a lot of projects yeah so I
always like to kind of keep something on the backburner working right now I'm
kind of on a submarine kick so I've been taking a bunch of like Star Wars plastic
models and then putting submarine internals inside of them and kind of
flying them around in water so lets you get that like cool space motion yeah at
like a scale that I can work on in the backyard it's almost a computer control
right then you can film it and it can do spins and and multi axis movement the
greatest compliment I got on one of those is like somebody's like this looks
like kind of lame CGI I was like I know it's real it's real that's exactly what
the old movies were like right awesome one last thing this this canopy here
vacuform yeah it's a big back form piece off of I think it's PT G so like a soda
bottle material and I made a big plywood form same process like pull all the 2d
surfaces off glue it together and then it took a few poles to try to get one
that came out right but it came out pretty good I hope you don't stop making
large size Lego flying Lego because this is such a cool thing you're gonna take
it up I'll take it up for you guys and share you flies all right let's go look