Chris Anderson has taken his DIY UAV from GeekDad project to real business:
About two years ago, my then-9-year-old and I worked on a cool project to program Lego Mindstorms to fly a RC plane, which we cheekily called a Lego UAV. (And were then, even more cheekily, accused of “weaponizing Lego” — UAVs are export controlled as weapons!). It worked, amazingly, and was a lot of fun.Then, as sometimes happens, I got obsessed, while he moved on to other things. In the past two years, I’ve made cellphone UAVs, Basic Stamp UAVs, autonomous blimps, and a true gyros+acellerometers+GPS autopilot version of the Lego Mindstorms UAV that’s now in the Lego Museum in Billund, Denmark. We set up an amateur UAV community at DIYDrones.com, and get thousands of people each day exploring this new dimension of aerial robotics.
Now this project has gone pro. Our first commercial autopilot, the Arduino-compatible ArduPilot, has been released and our goal of taking an order or two of magnitude out of the cost of an autopilot has been achieved: it’s $24.95!
Combined with a RC plane, this makes it easy to build a complete UAV for less than $500, which is really kind of amazing.