Behold the mighty Crococopter!
Disclaimer: this is by no means something to seriously consider building. It's just a little tongue-in-cheek side project made while being grounded.
TL;DR: Yes, it's real and it actually flies. Here's a few videos: start with the shoe doing some LOS flips and rolls and the shoe being flown in FPV. Due to popular demand, here's the shoe kicking a beach ball (LOS and FPV combined).
So we start off by finding an old, dirty and ugly, but still perfectly usable Crocs knock-off shoe. Strip a grounded LDARC/KingKong 200GT off all its electronics and use those to ultimately make the shoe do flips and flops. As the shoe comes with very convenient openings, we only need to use some zip ties and double-sided sticky tape to attach things to it, without compromising the canopy in any permanent way. It's still going back to do its original job after a replacement frame for the 200GT arrives.
This is a 5 inch build, so for arms we use two 31cm long and about 2.5cm wide plywood strips to clear the canopy. Electronics sit on a cardboard slate, which is super lightweight and provides excellent vibration dampening. The most tedious part of the build is perhaps resoldering all the motor wires because of the extra arm length. Again, thanks to a decent amount of random openings in the canopy, one can go wild with picking where to route the motor wires through. Make sure to add some colorful heatshrink over solder joints to make it even uglier.
The motors (also salvaged from the 200GT) need to go down on arms, so we drill 3 holes - there are two 12mm apart for the screws, and a larger one inbetween them where the motor shaft with c-ring goes. While the bigger hole really only needs to go a couple mm deep, I still drilled it all the way through for better cooling. Not that it's necessary, but I figured the build needed something that says "cool", so there's that.
With all that empty space inside and out of the canopy, you have full artistic freedom on where to mount your FPV camera and receiver. I just stuck them on top of the whole thing, but later moved the receiver inside of the canopy to better protect the antennas. It's not like rubber causes any significant reception issues anyway, so I think I'll get away with that.
An important note about battery placement. Initially I planned to put it inside canopy at the heel, but that resulted in a serious backwards drift upon first takeoff. Resorted to double-locking tape and mounting the battery on the bottom of the frame to achieve a perfect CG.
What is total weight? I also want to build this drone. What do you thing about my choice of parts?: 1806 2300kv motors, 4x 10A esc, iflight f4 controller, Matek FCHUB-6S PDB and 3s 850mah battery (or 4s 1500mah is beter?)
AirbladeUAV has done it again and this time they've brought long range to the 5" class! Based on the popular Transformer Mini, the new Transformer 5" Ultralight adopts a lot of the same design philosophies with larger props and more payload capacity. It can fly upwards of 20 minutes on a 4 cell Li-Ion battery pack and in ideal conditions it's got a range of over 4 to 5 miles. In this guide I'll walk..
Read moreWith the release of the DJI FPV Drone cinematic FPV has become a lot more accessible, but you certainly don't want to crash a $750 drone! The QAV-CINE Freybott is a compact, lightweight cinematic FPV drone that can take a hit and keep going. It's a lot safer to fly indoors and around people. With a naked GoPro or the SMO 4k you can capture some great stabilized footage. In this guide I'll show you..
Read more
the crock with rgb led's would be crazy