Re:Lufthansa flight has near-miss with drone near Warsaw
by eterm on Tuesday July 21, 2015 @04:12PM
(#9925405)
A large part of it is their ability to keep themselves stable. That opens up a huge range of uses that weren't there previously, as well as reducing the chance you'll break it the first time out flying it.
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Re:Lufthansa flight has near-miss with drone near Warsaw
by jameshart on Tuesday July 21, 2015 @04:21PM
(#9925474)
I was thinking about this recently; seems like affordable consumer quadcopters are a consequence of the availability of cheap, lightweight solid-state accelerometers. Why are accelerometer chips cheap? Because they're ubiquitous in phones. Why are they ubiquitous in phones? Because Steve Jobs wanted the original iPhone to be able to tell which way up you were holding it.
(also, due credit to laptop hard drive 'freefall sensors' as another contributor).
Combine that with the cheap lithium battery and digital radio communication chipsets, also driven by phone volumes, and that's why 'radio controlled helicopters' are no longer a niche hobby, and instead a danger to aviation.
Re:Lufthansa flight has near-miss with drone near Warsaw
by jjwiseman on Tuesday July 21, 2015 @05:16PM
(#9925881)
Chris Anderson talks a lot about the smartphone-drone connection here: "How I Accidentally Kickstarted the Domestic Drone Boom" http://www.wired.com/2012/06/ff_drones/