You have to be a pretty big aviation nerd to know about [Willard Ray Custer] and his channel wing concept, but if you are, you’ll be giddy to hear about the semicircular profile of the HopFlyt Cyclone drone’s tandem wings. If you’re not quite that much of a nerd, please keep reading, because it’s a really neat concept that never — er — quite got off the ground.

[Custer]’s idea was pretty simple, and born of a shift in reference frame — he realized that only the relative wind over the wing mattered, not the airspeed of the entire aircraft. The same idea drives every blown-wing short-takeoff-and-landing (STOL) project from the DHC-7 turboprop airliner to the An-72 cargo jet: air from the engines washes over the wings, creating lift. Where [Custer] went further is that rather than blowing air over a straight wing, he wrapped the wing under the propeller in a semicircle to maximize the area of lower pressure — and thus lift — creating the “channel wing” that bears his name.

Theoretically, an aircraft with channel wings and powerful enough engines might be able to do vertical takeoffs just from the blown lift, but none of [Custer]’s prototypes demonstrated that — just excellent short-field capability. The HopFlyt drone would be the same, except that, being a tandem, it has double the channel wings of [Custer]’s more-conventional designs, and it’s also a tilt-wing to boot. In that mode, the added low-speed lift from the channel wing makes transitions easier than they otherwise would be — which isn’t anything to sneeze at, since transitioning from vertical to horizontal flight has always been the real bane of VTOL projects.

They’re claiming a reduced fuel burn of 10% in hover and transition thanks to the extra lift from the channel wings. You can see their prototype in action in the demo video embedded below. We once featured a project that went even further, blowing air across a special hollow wing for propulsion and blown lift. The easiest eVTOL project still starts with a quadcopter, though.

There are plenty of drones (and other gadgets) you can buy online that use proprietary control protocols. Of course, reverse-engineering one of these protocols is a hacker community classic. Today, [Zac Turner] shows us how this GPS drone can be autonomously controlled by a simple Arduino program or Python script.

What started as [Zac] sniffing some UDP packets quickly evolved into him decompiling the Android app to figure out what’s going on inside. He talks about how the launch command needs accurate GPS, how there’s several hidden features not used by the Android app, et cetera. And it’s not like it’s just another Linux SoC in there, either. No, there’s a proper Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) running, with a shell and a telnet interface. The list of small curiosities goes on.

After he finished reverse-engineering the protocol, he built some Python scripts, through which you can see the camera feed and control the drone remotely. He also went on to make an Arduino program that can do the latter using an Arduino Nano 33 IoT.

If you’ve ever heard the sound of an aircraft passing overhead and looked at an online plane tracker to try and figure out what it was, then you’ve interacted with ADS-B. It’s a protocol designed to enable easier aircraft monitoring, and it just so happens you can decode it yourself with the right hardware and software — which is how [John McNelly] came to develop ADSBee, an open source ADS-B receiver based around an RP2040.

ADS-B uses on–off keying (OOK) at 1 Mbps, and operates at 1090 MHz. This might seem like a rather difficult protocol to decode on a microcontroller, but the RP2040’s PIO is up to the task. All it takes is a bit of optimization, and a some basic RF components to amplify and digitize the signals.

However, not all aircraft utilize the 1090 MHz ADS-B implementation, and instead use a related protocol called UAT. Operating at 978 MHz, a second receiver is needed for decoding UAT traffic data, which is where the CC1312 comes into play. ADSBee may even be the first open source implementation of a UAT decoder!

What’s quite impressive is the various form factors the module is available in. Ranging from small solder-down modules to weatherproof outdoor base stations, nearly every potential need for an ADS-B receiver is covered. With POE or ESP32 S3 options available, there is no shortage of networking options either!

ADSBees have been placed in numerous locations, ranging from base stations to drones. One user even built out a tiny flight display cluster complete with traffic indicators into an FPV drone.

This isn’t the first time we have seen ADS-B receivers used by drone enthusiasts, but this is certainly the most feature rich and complete receiver we have come across.

By now we’re all familiar with the quad-rotor design most popular among modern drones, and of course there are many variants using more or less propellers and even fixed-wing drones that can fly autonomously. We’ve even seen drones that convert from rotorcraft to fixed-wing mid flight. But there are even more esoteric drones out there that are far more experimental and use even more bizarre wing designs that look like they shouldn’t be able to fly at all. Take [Starsistor]’s latest design, which uses a single motor and an unconventional single off-center wing to generate lift.

This wing, though, is not a traditional foil shape typically found on aircraft. It uses the Magnus effect to generate lift. Briefly, the Magnus effect is when lift is generated from a spinning object in a fluid. Unlike other Magnus effect designs which use a motor to spin a cylinder, this one uses a design inspired by Savonius wind turbines where a wing is free to rotate around a shaft. A single propeller provides a rotational force to the craft, allowing this off-center wing to begin spinning and generating lift. The small craft was able to sustain several flights but was limited due to its lack of active control.

[Starsistor] went through a number of iterations before finally getting this unusual craft to fly. His first designs did not have enough rotational inertia and would flip over at speed, which was fixed by moving the propeller further away from the center of the craft. Eventually he was able to get a working design to prove his conceptual aircraft, and we hope to see others from him in the future.

The iconic X-wing ship design from Star Wars is something many a hobbyist have tried to recreate, and not always with success. While [German engineer] succeeded in re-imagining an FPV quadcopter as an X-wing fighter, the process also highlighted why there have been more failures than successes when it comes to DIY X-wing aircraft.

For one thing, the X-wing shape is not particularly aerodynamic. It doesn’t make a very good airplane. Quadcopters on the other hand rely entirely on precise motor control to defy gravity in a controlled way. It occurred to [German engineer] that if one tilts their head just so, an X-wing fighter bears a passing resemblance to a rocket-style quadcopter layout, so he set out to CAD up a workable design.

One idea that seemed ideal but ultimately didn’t work was using four EDF (electric ducted fan) motors mounted in the same locations as the four cylindrical engines on an X-wing. Motors large enough to fly simply wouldn’t fit without ruining the whole look. A workable alternative ended up being the four props and brushless motors mounted on the ends of the wings, like you see here.

The unit still needed a lot of fine tuning to get to a properly workable state, but it got there. It takes off and lands vertically, like a classical quadcopter, but when flying at speed it levels out almost completely and looks just like an X-wing as it screams by. It’s in sharp contrast to the slow, methodical movements of this Imperial Shuttle drone.

There are also a couple design elements in [German engineer]’s build we thought were notable. The spring-loaded battery door (all 3D-printed, including the spring) looks handy and keeps the lines of the aircraft clean. And since it’s intended to be flown as an FPV (first person view) aircraft, the tilting camera mount in the nose swings the camera 90 degrees during takeoff and landing to make things a little easier on the pilot.

3D models for the frame (along with a parts list) are up for anyone who wants to give it a shot. Check it out in the video, embedded below.

LED billboards are cyberpunk-dystopian enough for most, but it can get worse. For example, this project by [Concept Crafted Creations] that takes the whole concept and takes it airborn (literally) in the form of a flying POV sphere called “Zippy”.

We love persistence-of-vision (POV) displays, and have featured plenty before, from the very complicated to the fairly simple. The idea is simple: take one or more rings of LEDs and spin them rapidly enough that the persistence-of-vision effect creates a solid image in your visual field. We covered the basics years back. “Zippy” has one ring of addressable LEDs that surrounds the thing that makes it unique: the quadcopter at its core. None of those other projects could fly, after all.

You might imagine a big, spinning ring is going to have a lot of torque to cancel out, and that is true — about 2.3 kgf — and it led to a lot of prototypes crashing early on. After trying to use flaps to direct the downwash of the quadcopter rotors to counter the spin, [Concept Crafted Creations] eventually added two extra props for yaw control, and that seemed to do the trick. We say “quadcopter” because that’s the configuration, but Zippy ended up heavy and needs eight lift motors to fly. PVC pipe and PLA aren’t the lightest build materials, after all. That’s ten props, total, plus another outrunner to spin the POV ring. All those motors, plus the current draw of the LEDs means the flight time might not impress — but Zippy sure does, at last as long as the batteries hold out.

There’s something eye-catching about POV displays, and seeing this one drifting upwards like Kang and Kodos decided to steal the Los Vegas Sphere is even more arresting. That made the crash at the end of the video sad to see, but [Concept Crafted Creations] hasn’t ruled out rebuilding it if his viewers show enough interest. So if you like what you see, head over to YouTube and leave an encouraging comment for him to try, try again.

In today’s “News from the Dystopia” segment, we have a story about fighting retail theft with drones. It centers on Flock Safety, a company that provides surveillance technologies, including UAVs, license plate readers, and gunshot location systems, to law enforcement agencies. Their flagship Aerodome product is a rooftop-mounted dock for a UAV that gets dispatched to a call for service and acts as an eye-in-the-sky until units can arrive on scene. Neat idea and all, and while we can see the utility of such a system in a first responder situation, the company is starting to market a similar system to retailers and other private sector industries as a way to contain costs. The retail use case, which the story stresses has not been deployed yet, would be to launch a drone upon a store’s Asset Protection team noticing someone shoplifting. Flock would then remotely pilot the drone, following the alleged thief back to their lair or hideout and coordinating with law enforcement, who then sweep in to make an arrest.

Police using aerial assets to fight crime is nothing new; California has an entire entertainment industry focused on live-streaming video from police chases, after all. What’s new here is that these drones lower the bar for getting aerial support into the mix. At a $1,000 per hour or more to operate, it’s hard to justify sending a helicopter to chase down a shoplifter. Another objection is that these drones would operate entirely for the benefit of private entities. One can certainly make a case for a public interest in reducing retail theft, since prices tend to increase for everyone when inventory leaves the store without compensation. But we don’t know if we really like the idea of being tailed home by a drone just because a minimally trained employee on the Asset Protection team of BigBoxCo is convinced a crime occurred. It’s easy enough to confuse one person for another or to misidentify a vehicle, especially on the potato-cams retailers seem to love using for their security systems. We also really don’t like one of the other markets Flock is targeting: residential HOAs. The idea of neighborhoods being patrolled by drones and surveilled by license plate cameras is a bridge too far, at least to our way of thinking.

Are you old enough to remember when having access to a T1 line was a true mark of geek cachet? We sure are, and in a time when the plebes were stuck with 9,600-baud dial-up over their POTS lines, working on a T1 line was a dream come true. Such was the allure that we can even recall apartment complexes in the tech neighborhoods outside of Boston listing T1 lines among their many amenities. It was pretty smart marketing, all things considered, especially compared to the pool you could only use three months a year. But according to a new essay by J. B. Crawford over at “Computers Are Bad”, T1 lines were actually pretty crappy, even in the late 90s and early 2000s. The article isn’t just dunking on T1, of course, but rather a detailed look at the whole T-carrier system, which can trace its roots back to the 1920s with Bell’s frequency-division multiplexing trunking systems. T1 was an outgrowth of those trunking systems, intended to link central offices but evolving to service customers on the local loop. Fascinating stuff, as always, especially the bit about replacing the loading coils that were used every 6,600′ along trunk lines to compensate for capacitance with repeaters.

We’ve heard of bricking a GPU, but ordering a GPU and getting a brick instead is something new. A Redditor who ordered an RTX 5080 from Amazon was surprised to find a plain old brick in the package instead. To be fair, whoever swiped the card was kind enough to put the brick in the original antistatic bag; one can’t be too careful, after all. The comments on the Reddit post have a good selection of puns — gigabricks, lol — and good fun was had by all, except perhaps for the unfortunate brickee. The article points out that this might not be a supply chain issue, such as the recent swap of a GPU for a backpack, which, given the intact authentication seals, was likely done at the factory. In this case, it seems like someone returned the GPU after swapping it out for the brick, assuming (correctly, it would seem) that Amazon wouldn’t check the contents of the returned package beyond perhaps weighing it. How the returned inventory made it back into circulation is a bit of a mystery; we thought returned items were bundled together on pallets and sold off at auction.

Speaking of auctions, someone just spent almost half a million bucks on one of the nine estimated remaining wooden-cased Apple I computers. It’s a lovely machine, to be sure, with its ByteShop-style wooden case intact and in excellent shape. The machine is still working, too, which is a nice plus, but $475,000? Even with a Dymo embossed label in Avocado Green — or is that Harvest Gold? — that seems a bit steep. There’s apparently some backstory to the machine that lends to its provenance, including former ownership by the first female graduate of Stanford Law School, June Blodgett Moore. This makes it the “Moore Apple-1” in the registry (!) for these machines, only 50 of which were ever made. One wonders if the registry makes allowance for basic maintenance of vintage electronics like these machines; does routine recapping affect their value?

And finally, continuing with the vintage theme, we’ve been following the adventures of [Buy It Fix It] over on YouTube as he attempts to revive a Williams Defender arcade machine from the 1980s. We remember this game well, having fed far too many quarters into the one at the Crazy 8s Pool and Arcade back in the day. This machine is in remarkably good shape for being over 40 years old, but it still needed some TLC to get it running again. The video documents a series of cascading failures and maddening intermittent faults, requiring nearly every tool in his kit to figure out. At the end of the second video, [Buy It] reckons he put 60 hours into the repair, a noble effort with fantastic results. Enjoy!