Would it be possible to buy a drone, mod it with solar panels so it never runs out of power, attach a phone or something to allow a mobile hotspot so you can control it anywhere around with cellphone towers.
Whenever it needs recharge, leave it on top of a house or roof so no one notices it. Then go back to exploring the world and stalking people walking with your handy drone all from the safety of inside your house.
Is this a cool idea, does a drone like this actually exist? Or do we have to make one? Im willing to invest $3k max into this project. Would need to buy a high powered drone with a good frame I can attach a solar panel on its body. Light enough to be able to take lift. Same with a phone and a way to wire them properly so they constantly stay charged by the solar panel.
What do you guys think of this idea and what are some improvements?
That sounds like a pretty cool idea OP. If you're willing to go chinkshit you could probably make the idea work for under $100. Your biggest hurdle will probably be interfacing between the phone and the drone control systems. Good luck.
Caleb White
From what i researched, I found some drones that work off of wifi. As long as the mobile hotspot doesnt break, the connection can easily be established from the drone to the phone.
Hudson Cooper
>Would it be possible to buy a drone, mod it with solar panels so it never runs out of power
No. The amount of power you'd get from the solar panels wouldn't even produce 0.1% of the power required for the drone to hover.
Xavier Cox
What about if I let it charge in the midday on some roof and fly in in the night?
Jace Allen
Im looking at adding an external battery as well, that way I can keep it in the air for a good 30 minutes before I have to wait 2 days for it to fully recharge.
Ryder Campbell
If you're planning on 2 days of charging for 30 minutes of flight, that's plausible. But having a drone that can fly perpetually from solar power is beyond even a pipe dream.
Gavin Bennett
OP here. I plan to livestream this on twitch or some shit like that. Would be fun to watch.
Imagine mass producing drones like this. How many awesome streaming videos we would get to see of people fucking around with people in real life.
Jaxson Long
People would hunt your drones and call swat on you when they intercept your IP.
Easton Martin
Of course not. I know how long it takes to recharge a handsize drone just to fly for 7 minutes. Most of the time it will be recharging. But for the brief 30 minutes, I would be able to have fun flying it across country.
Chase Cruz
That just makes it even more fun haha.
Lincoln Bell
So really your question is simply 'can I charge a drone battery from solar power?'. For that you can just buy a solar setup that charges a big SLA/LiPo battery & use that to power the charger when you need it - any hobby grade LiPo charger will run from DC.
Leo Anderson
You would neet do lighten it's mass as much as possible and make a unified power supply system, so you will need a smartphone with good camera fully disassembled, 3.6 v extended capacity battery for it to sustain longer streaming and 4g connection. Also a power converter to charge both drone and phone batteries. You would need some kind of otg-to drome interface to control the flight to.
Joseph Adams
Or just make a custom SBC for controlling the drone
Oliver Green
if you're willing to buy infrared cameras thats a ice idea, else I'm seeing black for that project.
Sebastian Sanchez
It depends on what you mean by "drone". A mutlirotor sacrifices aerodynamics for maneuverability and is thus completely unflyable without power. A plane based or otherwise aerodynamic drone can glide without power, making it last far longer. This is why the military uses them
Asher Morris
Absolutely unfeasible unless you do it in some very rural places, because most legislations forbid it due to its dangerousness. I know a guy in the film industry who used his in some random city street (illegally), and for having been there at that time, I can tell you that it's noisy AF, it scares the shit out of people (with reason) and I'm pretty sure these propellers could very easily cut through limbs
Also, it would be too easy to damage buildings and wires and the consequences of interfering with a plane's flight could be disastrous
Christian Phillips
I took that into account. I figured i could add some type of bomb to it that will self-destruct or burn the phone's sim card at least so you cant back-trace it to me. If I ever happen to fly it into a situation like that and someone gets a hold of it.
Hunter Gray
>wants to stream patently illegal activities on twitch >wants to do so with no chance of getting caught
Please be bait
Hudson Morris
ill stream it behind VPNs, while using the wifi from McDonalds. How about that?
Think that parrot ar drone 2.0 works with wwan usb stick.
As for solar charging it would take ages.
Micro generators would be more interesting. Someone actually tried making one out of RC components but it had very low efficiency.
One more interesting thing to make is wired quadcopter that uses gps hold but is powered by wires from the ground. That would make cool surveillance platform since it could stay high above one position for almost unlimited time.
Nathaniel Johnson
>what you are proposing is dangerous and illegal >dont worry I'll just put a bomb on it
Henry Phillips
>fly into an area with bad signal >connection drops >no way of getting it up in the air again 3k down the drain
Anthony Martin
>Would it be possible it could work but there are a few limiting factors:
solar panels are not efficient for their size at the moment, so weight would slow down the uav. I think they produce 1000w / square meter. the phantom 4 battery is 68Wh, so even with a 20w panel it will take over 4hours to charge and you will also have the flytime limited because of extra weight, and you will have to still give area under the props to push the air down
you could do this with a fixed wing (plane), it would be way more efficient, but you not have the same amount of control, and landing somewhere safe will be a challenge. I think some people on youtube have put solar cells on planes before and flown up to 6 hours youtube.com/watch?v=KHV-RjvTb1c this guy did 200km
the 3/4g internet could work, but there would be a huge amount of latency, so you wont really be able to fly close to objects fpv, but it should be fine if you were to fly high. you will probably be able to code in something to make the uav fly home or back to where it was if the signal drops
I think some farmers use something similar, but its a quad/hex that flys over the crops to scare away the birds, and then it comes home to dock at a base station to recharge.
Hunter Diaz
>drone, mod it with solar panels so it never runs out of power
Brandon Jenkins
This is especially true for 3k drones, most of which are shit
It happened to my brother in law, he lost signal while his drone was flying over the sea
