Weird Drone Experiments

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]In this video, we're testing three weird drone experiments.

[00:00:04]We're going to see, can you add weight to a drone to make it fly longer? Plus, I make this really cool utility drone, which I have free plans for that you guys can also build.

[00:00:14]Our first experiment involves drones with wings.

[00:00:19]Now, maybe this is just called a VTOL, but I want to try a passive system because I've seen some interesting videos on YouTube from like RC Test Flight. This wing has a lot of drag and a lot of lift and it can really tug the drone around. Wow.

[00:00:31]>> And this crazy video from the Ukraine war which involves directly just strapping wings to your drone and then trying to increase your range and run time. What if we took a tiny Whoop, which is this tiny drone I have that only flies for about 5 minutes, optimize air foils, make a cool pivoting mechanism that's right on the aircraft's center of gravity, and get an unencumbered flight experience where we can extend the drone's flight time, probably double, maybe even triple its normal flight time, cuz it only flies for like 3 to 4 minutes.

[00:00:59]The first thing I'm going to do is slice up some air foils.

[00:01:06]like that. That perfect little wing. But we can't just use any air foils. Daniel in his cool video, he basically used a Clark Y, which is a great air foil for generally conventional airplanes. But the problem is the air foil itself is the issue I think that he had in this video. So this air foil has a very very strong pitching moment, a nose down pitching moment because of the lift distribution across the wing. Mainly like if we were to actually put a center point in this wing generally about here, 25% maybe 30% of the overall cord spacing of the wing without a tail just air foil itself. It tends to completely tuck over and nose down. If you bounce it around here or wherever you try to bounce it, it basically doesn't seem to auto center. Clark Y. Now, when you throw a normal air foil like this Clark Y, it just pitches down because it's not a naturally stable air foil. Quick side note though, you take a Clark Y and throw it upside down.

[00:01:53]It somehow flies like really well. Like it's like trimmed in, which is so funny.

[00:01:59]Like I did not think Clark Y would fly this well inverted. The thing with the Clark Y though that I want to change is I want to add a little bit of a tail surface to it that's kind of reflexed upwards. Well, these are generally called reflexed air foils and they generally work really well for flying wings or planks because they don't have this tucked down pitching moment.

[00:02:15]Generally, these air foils are less efficient because of this reflex portion. They can't really generate as much lift as a Clark Y by itself. But we don't need a tail section or anything to make it stable. And now to show you that this is perfectly balanced, we add a little bit of nose weight. Balance it along this pivoting axis I kind of just randomly picked, which is around the 25 to 30% of the uh cord line from the front of the wing. And it basically should glide like perfectly. It should be like a perfect little airplane with no tail section or anything. So I throw this little glider here, which is just a pre-cut reflexed air flow. And it glides great. Now we just take a simple drone, add some pivot bars to it, slap the wings on. So my theory here is because the pivoting point is along the wings perfect center of gravity, it should always just kind of pivot into the relative wind and begin a perfect glide.

[00:02:58]Therefore, whatever the drone does, it doesn't really matter except the drone just flies forward. The wings develop lift. They find the right center depending on how much pitching I want to do. Like I want to go real fast, the wings just create more lift and it flies up. I slow down and the wings are still basically perfectly gliding. So that's my idea. Let's see if it works.

[00:03:34]Oh, I don't think I even need the vertical stabilizers on the sides. It seems to naturally just glide really well.

[00:03:49]The straight wing is working pretty well, but I noticed it's maybe not perfectly stable. Planks, which is this style of wing, generally are kind of pitch sensitive. So, I'm going to add a little bit of sweep, kind of like a delta- wing jet sort of style to make this even more stable passively. And we hover. And now it's going to stay in this vertical position, but when I move forward, I'm going to use the airflow to pitch the wings forward. And then the drone will just get this additional boosted lift. sort of like a real passive VTOL system without any programming or coding for the ultimate simple VTOL drone experiment.

[00:04:21]And that works so much better.

[00:04:36]I'm going to hover, not change the throttle.

[00:04:41]Move forward and it will just start climbing like pretty rapidly.

[00:04:47]Look, it's climb. That's the wing doing the lift by itself. I'm not adding any any extra throttle. And now it come back in hover and it descends and the battery is dead. That's wild. Like the wings really do a good job.

[00:05:21]It's like having the best of both worlds. It's like an airplane and a helicopter. Oh, wait. That's called a VTOL. But, you know, rather than having to make a V tall with tilting wings, tilting motors, you just took an off-the-shelf drone, made some pivoting wings that are perfectly balanced, put them right along the drone's center of gravity, like this way, but also longitudinally this way. The center of gravity is very close to where the pivoting wings are. And this thing flies really well. Like, this is going to be a great performer as far as an actual utility of just flying around a drone for fun. It really does work. We have to take this outside and give this thing a a really good kind of like duration smooth flight. So, we have the naked Whoop drone.

[00:06:12]And it flew for a staggering 4 minutes.

[00:06:16]All right, let's see how it does with the wings.

[00:06:20]Would you look at that? 6 minutes 11 seconds.

[00:06:47]That's really not too bad at all. That's actually kind of incredible cuz we were flying pretty fast. Like if we were trying to like just do a bunch of scanning or just really cruising that would have gone a very long distance and 4 minutes versus 6 minutes carrying that much weight.

[00:07:02]I'd say woo wings is a pretty good idea.

[00:07:04]It really doesn't affect the flying quality of the Whoop that much. You do have to tune your gyro filters though if you do this. I had to like crank those filters up because without them this drone just basically flew up and crashed in the ceiling. It basically did what's called a runaway which you don't want.

[00:07:15]So if you want to try this at home, make sure you crank your filters up.

[00:07:19]So, it looks like we just basically invented a VTOL, but it's a simple VTOL and you can literally integrate this to any drone.

[00:07:37]Now, I have you know that I have experimented with this for quite a while and it took me a while to discover that this earlier drone crashed a lot because your filters in Beta Flight really screw this a lot. You really have to crank the filters up to deal with the foam oscillations and wings because it just causes the drone to basically fly away and become uncontrollable and respond to nothing. So if you try this, crank up your gyro filters and you should have a pretty good time.

[00:08:01]>> So this is pretty cool. But you know what else is cool? RTR sent me this AH1 Cobra. Check this thing out. It's a GPS helicopter.

[00:08:26]This helicopter is super cool.

[00:08:29]But I wanted to try one more thing because I saw this picture of this Bell 47 with wings attached to it. And you know, it got me thinking cuz we did this drone with the wings. How would this helicopter respond?

[00:08:44]That looks really cool. but it ultimately didn't really make the helicopter fly any longer. That's because the helicopter is very, very fixed when it comes to programming rotor head speeds and all that, and it didn't really change much in RPM. Anyways, the helicopter is really, really sweet. If you want to check out one of these things, check out RTR Hobby. They sell helicopters like this and much, much more.

[00:09:04]That drone was sweet. It flew really good, especially in forward flight when the wings produce lift.

[00:09:11]But what if we didn't want to fly forward? What if we just wanted to lift a large amount of weight? Can we just put a really big rotor on top of the drone and increase our efficiency that way?

[00:09:38]Look at that air foil. Basically, if you haven't figured out by now, I have a new toy and I just can't resist playing with it any chance I get. It looks perfect.

[00:09:49]Check it out. It's assembled.

[00:09:52]It's so flimsy. Look at it. Let's turn on this death trap. Let's see what kind of lift we get.

[00:10:00]All right, this is like a little under half throttle. All right, cranking this bad boy up.

[00:10:10]It's not producing any lift. Wa. That's weird. When you turn it off, it like jumps up. I think maybe at these RPMs, the motors are pulling the air foil down or or something is going on here, but it's basically flatlining and running with like zero pitch. Yeah, if you look, you can see it's completely flat.

[00:10:30]Basically, >> how are you going to fix it?

[00:10:34]>> I have tabs. I'm going to try to twist the trailing edge down to increase the angle of attack of the blades. So there, so the blades produce more lift. If this works, I know I'm on the right track.

[00:10:46]Maybe I'll increase this blade grip here and make the blades naturally have a higher angle of attack. That's a lot. So my theory is prop spin air flow hits these more pitching moments. When you pitch the blade up like this, you get more lift.

[00:11:07]Oh, that's better. Yeah, you can see now it looks pretty uniform. It actually wasn't because more blade pitch towards the end versus the center. I'll crank it up a little more.

[00:11:20]Oh, it sounds cool.

[00:11:25]Oh, there goes the camera.

[00:11:29]I think it's producing lift, but I guess I should probably feel how much lift it's producing. Then we can mount it to the drone. see if this idea of a high lift, high aspect ratio rotor can really increase the flight times of a crappy drone with really really low aspect ratio propeller.

[00:11:50]Oh wow. Yeah, it's basically carrying itself.

[00:11:57]It sounds so cool. Let's see if the drone can pick up this assembly first.

[00:12:08]Okay, it does. Uh, I got to be careful because these blades will go into the rotor and that would just shred them and it would basically make this all for nothing. All right. Okay, there's a slight problem here.

[00:12:22]I can't start the rotors.

[00:12:26]So, I have a bucket.

[00:12:28]Yeah. See, look. They impact the props.

[00:12:30]I could even do this in flight if I wanted to.

[00:12:36]All right, that's half motor power.

[00:12:54]I have more power and I can bring the block power down.

[00:13:14]I think the rotor was starting to die. I think the back I mean it sound like it was getting lower. So, I really had to bring it down. I don't think we're harnessing the rotor thrust enough, though. So, I'm going to increase the angle of attack with the blade grips and see if we can produce even more lift.

[00:13:27]Because I would like to see this quad basically hovering at a lower throttle setting because you can hear the motor RPMs. They're like, what if they were like lower? Therefore, the quadcopter itself will fly longer and we put more of the flying duties on this rotor assembly. It's like attaching a big balloon to the drone except the balloon is this rotor blade system. That's pretty cool. This is just like the earlier experiment except more in line with the quadcopter for long hovering times.

[00:14:08]Oh man, I can't even get started.

[00:14:13]Don't cut my legs off.

[00:14:18]Okay, that's sketchy.

[00:14:37]Oh wow, the quadcopter is running at such a low RPM now. That's funny.

[00:14:46]That works so good. The blade has a coding angle to it now, too. You can see the coating a little bit like a bigger helicopter would.

[00:14:56]And I really have to catch it. That carries a lot of throttle.

[00:15:04]That looks good.

[00:15:32]So, we have this weird rotor drone, but how efficient is it? Well, I flew it and we time-lapsed it. 9 minutes. I did some math on the batteries we had on board, and it equates to about 25.53 W hours of battery. And the average power consumption was about 170.2 watts. The boring drone that had a larger battery just cuz it's what I had around here and I did the math on the watt hours and it's 32.56. Flew for about 10 minutes and its average power consumption was about 195.36 watts. THAT'S not that much of a different number. I mean it you can see that is a little bit better. But the other thing is the rotor drone weighed more. The rotor drone weighed 991 g and with that wattage score it equates to about 5.82 g per watt. And the Boring drone, 742 grams, a lot lighter, using more wattage, gets a score of 3.79 grams per watt. Well, what does that mean?

[00:16:22]Well, it means the rotor drone is a lot more efficient at lifting weights per wattage of battery that it uses. So, it gets a score of about six almost, and this one's about maybe four. That's pretty good. I'm really happy with that.

[00:16:32]The only thing is we took the drone outside, we flew it, and it really only seems to be efficient at hovering, moving forward, and it it gets this really crazy wiggle and wobble.

[00:16:42]So, I'm really not quite sure if this rotor design is really the best, but it's very good at lifting weight.

[00:16:56]Okay, I want to know what happens if we climb up and I disarm the quadcopter part. What is going to happen? All right, ready? Disarming quad.

[00:17:05]Oh, it's coming down.

[00:17:10]That's pretty neat.

[00:17:16]Oh, and we broke it. We've made some kind of useless drones in this videos, but what if I wanted to make an actual useful drone that looked cool?

[00:17:47]because I've gotten some new interest. I went to the ham radio convention and they have these things called meshtastic nodes. It's like an open- source cell network, if you will, of walkie texties that you can basically set up your own nodes and have your own like radio and you can contact just random people or people within your own encrypted group chats. Pretty cool technology. It's like a great addition of the first amendment that you can control yourself. So, I want to install one of these things on top of my parents flag pole so I can kind of reach them in an emergency situation or anything like that. But, I need this drone to do it. So, I made this sick drone that folds out, has a little bit of payload capacity, and it looks kind of cool cuz I don't surprisingly have a drone that I can fly right now that's pretty useful for anything. To measure these parts, first for catting, we need calipers. Not just any calipers, big calipers. How big? Way big.

[00:18:59]Check this out. Do you notice something?

[00:19:02]It looks like the wood parts disappeared. Do you want to know who made them disappear? PCB Way, our sponsor for this video. They've been a big fan of my channel and they sponsored a ton of builds. PCB Way specializes in making printed circuit boards. However, if you didn't know, they do so much more than just PCBs. Like these plates in this video are made out of carbon fiber.

[00:19:22]They're so much better than the plywood.

[00:19:23]I just made the plywood to test this to make sure it works good. But now we have these beautiful carbon plates that are made by them. It's super easy. You just upload your design files to the website, get an instant quote, pay for it, and then in a week or two, boom, your parts show up at your doorstep. They do these carbon plates, but they've also made these blocks of aluminum. They made this giant 3D printed boat. And they do so much, much more. So, if you're interested in making this project, which the design files are free, you can use PCB way, Peter Striple 10, and get $10 off or over $30 or more. Big shout out to PCB Way for making these projects happen. Really, really thankful for them. Anyways, we got a sick carbon fiber drone. Now, we got some more stuff to do.

[00:19:59]They have these sick carbon plates that we're going to install into this drone.

[00:20:04]This drone is just made out of some Avroto motors, which are basically 10 years old at this point. Some old stuff I got laying around, a SpeedyB flight controller running INAP, and some ELS radios. It's basically a pretty cheap build from stuff I just got floating around in my shop.

[00:20:22]Heat.

[00:20:37]Heat.

[00:20:50]All right, that works.

[00:21:18]All right, so we have the drone and it's now time to install the node on top of the flag pole. It should be pretty simple, right? We attach a line to the drone, fly up the doohickey, and it just sits on top of the pole.

[00:21:37]The drone wiggling or is it the box wiggling?

[00:21:47]Well, it's kind of a lot harder than you think.

[00:21:50]So, we're trying this thing around and well, I think day one is not really a success. It just kind of blew around too much, slapped around the pole. All right, I think I might have to give up cuz I I can't see the drone battery level.

[00:22:10]All right, let's try this thing again. I have a fatter cone section at the bottom. And we have a monkey tail onto it that we can use to guide this box in go towards the street. Okay. Come back.

[00:22:40]Come back.

[00:22:43]Oh, I fell off by itself. Oh, it's not perfectly lined up, though.

[00:22:49]Well, I magically got up there. Well, mission accomplished sort of.

[00:22:55]And after a few minutes of struggling, it's on the pole. And now we have our flag at top the pole with our meshtastic node. And now we can talk to everyone across Dayton, Ohio without any cell phone bills, without any monitoring. And it's all basically free.

[00:23:08]>> Hold up.

[00:23:16]You're on the ground.

[00:23:18]Oh, I broke my new drum.

[00:23:21]>> Okay.

[00:23:22]>> It's not too busted. My gimbal is still fine. Yeah, that's really not too bad.

[00:23:27]The carpet plates are still in one piece. Well, there we go. Third experiment.

[00:23:32]Surprisingly, all of the drone is still in one piece. As far as the drone itself is concerned, I can rotate my motors back cuz they're just friction fit. The ABS parts are still intact. The carbon plate is completely undamaged. See, that's why I went with the plastic shear pins because they all moved. Any one of them that, you know, needed to break off, they all slid out and they saved my frame. So, you know, that's one side effect of making it kind of cheap.

[00:23:55]Okay. Yeah, this is totally fixable. I'm going to go fix it. Well, how do we remove this stupid thing from the pole?

[00:24:00]Because it's kind of offkilter and I want to reinstall it with some more better spacing cuz it's just not right.

[00:24:05]Well, I have this hook installed to the drone and we just simply line up to the little hoop I have on the top. It clips on and then the hook falls off this guidance pole is right underneath the drone. Now, we literally just yank this thing off the flag pole. Surprisingly, it's easier to take it off the flag pole than it was to install it. I think I need to make this kind of cone thing I have basically on the bottom a lot larger so it's easier to kind of like slip it up and just kind of have it fall on top of the pole and basically be guided by the funnel thing at the bottom. The idea is the funnel eventually gets wet and falls off cuz it's made out of crappy cardboard.

[00:24:52]So, there you have it. Three weird drone experiments.

[00:24:56]If you like videos like this, make sure you check out the wacky airplane experiments video.