Street Tech

I wrote a review of the WowWee FlyTech Dragonfly for the next issue of MAKE. It’s a pretty darn nifty flyer. Honestly, it’s actually a lot cooler than I thought. For a lot of these sorts of toys with a high-tech “wow” factor, I always wonder how much playtime kids (of any age) will get out of the thing. With the Dragonfly, it’s really fun to fly and to try to improve your flying skills. It’s also great that it’s very lightweight, in a Nerfy sorta way, so you can fly it both indoors and out (on VERY calm days). Of course, once you’ve had your fill of the Dragonfly as-is, it’s hacks time. The Dragonfly is still fairly new, so there aren’t that many mods out there yet, and given the light weight requirements, hacking it will be a real challenge.

So far, FlyTech owners have taken the styro shell off to figure out how it works and what parts it uses, replaced the LED status lights, from blue (at about 3V) to red (1.6V) to save some battery life. In stripping the shell and revealing the hardware, one hacker tracked down the Chinese company that makes the tiny Lithium Polymer battery packs. There’s a pack available that’s over twice the capacity of the 50mAh now in the Dragonfly. Unfortunately, it’s also twice as heavy, so again, the challenge is compensating for weight issues. Out of the box, the Dragonfly gets about 10 minutes on a 20-minute charge. The battery pack is charged from a cable connecting to 6-AA batts inside the R/C unit.

Last week, we blogged about Wired’s Chris Anderson and his efforts to build a robot autopilot out of LEGO Mindstorms NXT and other reasonably-cheap, available parts. HiTechnic, makers of the NXT Compass and other third-party sensors, read Chris’s post and sent him a prototype of their NXT Gyro module. He blogs about installing his prototype autopilot set-up in a model R/C plane.

The post is on a new Wired Blogs site called GeekDad, which already has some really cool content from (besides Chris) Kevin Kelly, Thomas Hawk, Adam Grosser, and others.

Kinda makes me wish my son wasn’t all grown up, but luckily, I raised him to be a proper geek, so he (like his dad) would likely still be enthused about much of what’s found here. Like launching rocket motors sans rocket. Now what geek ever gets too old for that?

MAKE, Create Digital Music, and Etsy Labs sponsored a Homemade Music Night in Brooklyn this past Thursday. MAKE has a round-up of links to those involved and Flickr sets. Peter Kirn, of Create Digital Music, has a report on the evening, with some cool photos and a vid of the Beat Blocks, a tangible music interface where players can constructed drum machine sequences by moving blocks (each a subsequence of the loop) around an electrified grid.

William Gurstelle, one of my fellow MAKE boardmembers, has a new book out called Whoosh Boom Splat: The Garage Warrior’s Guide to Building Projectile Shooters. Highlights include the Jam Jar Jet (from MAKE Vol. 5), the Elastic Zip Cannon (a membrane-powered shooter), and a Da Vinci Architronito, a steam-powered cannon. Bill is also author of Backyard Ballistics and Adventures from the Technology Underground.

Here’s a link to the webpage for the book and Bill’s YouTube commercial for it.