If you’ve always wanted a drone but were put off by the price then the guys at Flybrix have just the answer. For a fraction of the price of a normal one you can now take to the skies……and all with the help of the legendary and trusty Lego brick.
Based out of San Francisco, CA, tech company Flybrix are set to revolutionise the drone market. Whilst the price of drones continue to fall, making them more accessible to potential ‘pilots’, there can still be a hefty outlay if using them regularly. This however could be about to progress even further, and in a world where technology is seemingly almost changing on a daily basis, it is changing thanks to something that has been around since 1949.
Flybrix was, and still is (albeit as an aside at the moment), a company that was in the business of developing sophisticated drones and microdrones with great technical capability. However in testing their prototypes they realised that the cost of repairing crash landing and damaged drones was seriously putting a hole in their bank balance, so they came up with the idea of using materials that would be ‘crash friendly’ and easily reparable, and they worked out they could do this with the humble Lego brick.
They realised that actually making a drone using Lego bricks offered many advantages, and the rest as they say is history.
So quick and easy is it that the company say from you first opening your box to taking off can be around 15 minutes.
Other positives include that the designs of the drones a really down to the individual making it. You can easily make a custom, one-off never-before-seen creation.
Each Flybrix kit comes with propellers, motors, custom attachment bricks, pre-programmed Arduino-compatible flight control circuit board, and all the necessary cables. Each kit also comes with smartphone compatibility for drone control, and the Deluxe edition comes with an actual physical remote for piloting your custom drone.
Flybrix says its software is open source and easy to modify to suit your needs; you could additionally add Wi-Fi and GPS modules to the PCB to enhance your build. There’s also a Chrome extension that lets you view and record data from the PCB’s on-board sensors and adjust settings.
Flybrix kits start at less than £120. For more information please see the official website here.