Okay Sup Forums, humor me here

Okay Sup Forums, humor me here.

Suppose I want to build a drone that functions as a mobile storage server. Most drones are already equipped to handle storage from their cameras but I'm thinking of having a much higher storage capacity on this.

Questions:
>Could I have a single Raspberry Pi handle both flight control and storage management?
>What safety precautions should I take? Will landing impact be too much for hard disks? Should I just use all flash storage?
>What type of climate protection is in order?
>Can I somehow implement a cooling solution?

I know this idea is completely retarded. It's just something I've been toying with.

Just strap piratebox on a pi zero and duct tape it on.

>cooling solution
Just fly around really fast :^)

ha
i like this idea. good luck OP

you should look into how long a drone will stay up with the current battery capacities. it makes no sense to do that.

I'm mostly thinking something short term anyway. Plus this drone would likely be custom.

>>Could I have a single Raspberry Pi handle both flight control and storage management?
Possibly for slow flying
>>What safety precautions should I take? Will landing impact be too much for hard disks? Should I just use all flash storage?
Well, this thing is going to be flying so vibration is expected to happen, better use a SSD
>>What type of climate protection is in order?
Depends on where you live and conditions, remember the drones are intended as toys
>>Can I somehow implement a cooling solution?
What for? Are you planning to mine buttcoins while flying?

OP you're running 4 gigantic fans above your tiny ass computer. What the fuck do you need a cooling solution for?

Is this so you can autonomously eject hard disks from your household to a safe location when he feds arrive?

This


And adding another fan for cooling could throw off your flight controls a little.

>Well, this thing is going to be flying so vibration is expected to happen, better use a SSD

Personally, I'm more worried about what will happen to the drive if the drone crashes, than I am about flight vibrations. Would an SSD be able to take a hit/fall like that?

It should, ssd's are theoretically shock resistant. Now if it crashes at a high enough velocity to break parts, things could be different. I'm sure some form of drive enclosure wouldn't hurt.

Why not just use a drone with 4g SIM card and upload to the cloud? This also means your drone can have unlimited RC control range so long as it's within range of a tower

I considered that but I mostly want to keep it localized. This is mostly an experiment with what and how many drives I can fit onto a drone.

A drone server...
Added WiFi/Mobile data, charged via solar.
GPS no ping and map packs indicating safe landing and hideouts.
Personal surveillance that detects cars and persons =< 50 meters away so that it can fly off to prevent capture.
Storage consisting of SSD devices.
General WiFi crack pack for hijacking less secure connections.

This could lead to some interesting headlines.

Part of me is considering some form of floating pwnie express here.

Throw a pineapple and IR spoofer inboard just because.

Going to get some orders started, hopefully we'll have enough lift power

(T)uahahhaha

No, a raspberry pi can't handle flight control. You definitely shouldn't use hard drives. Cooling shouldn't be necessary

ohohoho. Add some white fluff casing. So you can call it the "It's a fucking. Pwnie express"

What are we thinking for the frame setup?

>>What type of climate protection is in order?
Full immersion and water jets protection IP rating.

Those drones that run over WiFi links already are. They run FTP servers.

>quadcopters
>in current year

LOL, just LOL if you aren't building a drone dirigible and cover the top surface with solar panels for supplementary power. Since it would be filled with bouyant gas you'd also need less power for propulsion and flight, so more for your PI or what have you.

could also include a retractable cable with one of those electromagnet things that you can de/magnetise at will (I forget the term for it, it's like an electromagnet but it can be permenantly magnetised and only uses power while changing state) so you can anchor it to metallic objects

Aren't dirigibles quite susceptible to windy conditions?

that's why you have the magnet tether, so you can anchor it to a street light or something else ferrous until the wind calms down

Seems far more complex than just a bit of extra finagling with a copter design. The solar panel idea is a good one, but it will likely weigh more than the thing can support. Especially to get a helpful amount.

Assuming money is no object you'd want a really tiny device such as a pi zero using SSDs. The issue becomes how to interface them. USB 2 is much too slow to really be effective. At that point the best method effectively becomes strapping an Android phone to a drone with a huge SD card. Especially since then you have a battery built in and depending on the device up to 640gb of onboard storage at potentially AC wifi speeds.

But then it becomes why not use a device like a go flex satellite where you can add up to 2tb of storage. But then... Why strap it to a drone? A drone may have at best 20 minutes of battery life? You can't fill 2tb of storage in 20 minutes even with a ballin SSD since your wireless communication will be a maximum (theoretical) 1200 Mb/s or around 120 MB/s (accounting for packet information.)

well then that will be determined by the drone's maximum payload. there are large 2m, diameter drones available to consumers that are designed for carrying DSLRs. that would be your best bet for carrying the maximum possible number of hard drives

The idea of this project isn't exactly to have a point, I'm fully aware that just leaving the thing on the ground is significantly easier. I'm just trying to build off of an idea, see if something comes up in the process.

Like 30 mins max if you keep it lightweight and do a bit a research about motor KV ratings and propeller size etc.

>Could I have a single Raspberry Pi handle both flight control and storage management?
As someone who used to build autonomous drones, yes, it COULD, but you'd be much better getting something like a Naze32 or whatever, using modified firmware (Don't worry, it's all just arduino shit, like Marlin for 3d printers), and controlling it over serial.
You can probably run some realtime C shit on a pi to do it, but you'd be hogging so fucking much of the processing time it wouldn't be funny.
>What safety precautions should I take? Will landing impact be too much for hard disks? Should I just use all flash storage?
Put soft rubber boots on the landing gear, inflatable shit, and you'll be fine.
There's no reason to use spinning disks over SSD's in this case, so don't.
>What type of climate protection is in order?
Keep shit in a sealed box with some silicone absorbent shit in with it.
>>Can I somehow implement a cooling solution?
A metal box then.
Ever stood under a quad? A real quad, like the one you posted, not a foam toy or a DJI.
Lots of fucking airflow there m8.

Also, how much data we talking? 128GB? 1TB? 10TB?

Finally, power. You can get a 1KWh battery for $600 and that'll last you a WHILE, so consider docking and recharging, or just a really fucking long power cable. I'm not joking. I once had a drone tethered to my roof by about 1000m of wire. Had a battery just in case, but other than that got power 24/7. Could detach and fly away if need be, but I never did that as it'd mean 1km of cable all over my neighbors house.

>Possibly for slow flying
Nigga the faster a quad goes the easier it is to control, as the little movements are less important.
Anything without a dedicated micro would need a big fat pid, robust enough to handle the occasional 100ms hangup.
You could just make sure it always had its own thread, and that nothing else was using i2c.

How big should I be making this thing. Not sure where to be looking frame-wise.

anyway solar panels could keep it going for longer?

>Could I have a single Raspberry Pi handle both flight control and storage management?
Flight control is easily done on a 16mhz ATmega processor, pi's are like 1ghz. But, like the other dude said, a premade flight controller would be way better. Why reinvent the wheel right?

Think that's what I'll be settling on.

Nah. Best case scenario a solar panel that size gives you like 5 watts.

Even at hover a 1kg drone would use like 100w

Even if you use expensive lightweight frames the lipo batteries are bricks so getting a decent size drone significantly less than 1kg is real tough.

For instance I have some 2200mAh lipos which are pretty small and get me like 10 mins airtime on my (shitty and heavy) homemade drone weigh like 250g each.

If you're serious though check out a site called ecalc.

Does all the hard math for you.

I hope you mean short term as in a half hour or less beacuse that's all you're going to get out of a single battery charge

flash storage is going to be much lighter than HDDs. Shit, you can get terabyte SD cards