Shrediquette - the award-winning multirotors by William Thielicke

Results: 1st place indoor pylon challenge 1st place indoor exploration mission >= 4th place outdoor mission Special award: KLPD user trophy (best operational MAV) 2nd place endurance mission The 12th -15th of september 2011 was IMAV time again... The IMAV2011 is an international conference and flight competition for micro air vehicles . This year it took place in 't Harde (The Netherlands). We (a group of five hobbyists that are also members of the academic flight club Bremen) participated in the outdoor and indoor competitions, and I also had the opportunity to give a talk about some of my PhD work. Antenna tests I took my BOLT with me, and Tumba, one of my team members, took his " Zecke " and a fully autonomous " Ninja " to the competitions (his copters are also 100% built from scratch). For the outdoor competition, we had to fly 500m away and identify some things. With our standard video equipment, this seemed to be impossible, so w...

About two weeks ago, Julian from the german band "Feinkost" wrote an email to me: Together with his band mates, they were giving some concerts in Cameroon. The tenant of the "Seemannsheim" in Douala (I know him from previous trips to Cameroon too) seems to like my Cameroon video very much, so he showed it to the band while they were staying there. They were also enthusiastic about the video and because they were planning to make a video for the new song "Wenn du wiederkommst" , Julian decided to ask me for some aerial footage for the new video. Because these sort of "jobs" always seem to be fun, I agreed, and together with Thomas Leidig (camera operator, director) we shot the video at two locations in and around Hamburg. The weather conditions were a bit challenging, the first day at the tidelands had a lot of wind (although hardly turbulent) and some rain. On the second day we were shooting in the city of Hamburg with some storm and a lot ...

On the 29th of july I went to the Vilsflimmern short film festival in southern germany. The people were really friendly and very nice (although sometimes hard to understand, they speak a very special german language version down there... ;-D). Ten short films out of around 40 submitted ones were selected and shown in the evening on a large screen. Although the weather was really really bad (cold + rain), quite a number of people came to see the shorts. Nr. 6 was finally my film, it was a strange feeling to see it on such a large screen with many people... Unfortunately, the sound system seemed to suffer from the rain, about one minute of my movie was played without sound... Also a strange feeling ;-D Then the people from the Kulturverein Amberg announced the winners, and I was really suprised to hear my name! I got the third place for my movie, great!! © Uwe Walzenbach 2011 There is also a small clip from the television with some details about the festiva...

The FPV movie on Cameroon that I made some months ago will be shown on a short film festival. The festival is called "Vilsflimmern" and it will take place on the 29th of July. It is an open-air event in south-east germany. At that time I am on way way to france on holidays, but most likely, I'll spent some extra kilometers to visit this festival: http://www.tenano.de/ By the way: The Landkamp Festival was great fun! This is really a very nice Copter-meeting, I am already looking forward to the next year's meeting! I also visited the FPV-community.de meeting, and that was also great. Really nice to meet some people in "real life".

Only one week to go for this years LandKamp! Anyone that is interested in copters should really visit this nice meeting. Last year it was a lot of fun with many friendly and interesting people. This is what I'll take with me this year (actually all copters I have :-D): This year’s “Landkamp 2.11” takes place from the 2nd of June to 5th of June 2011 at the sports ground which is located next to the soccerclub in Ostheim/Rhön. “Landkamp” is a privately organised event. There will be many “Kopter” fans from all over Germany. “Landkamp” is one of the longest multi-kopter conventions in Germany due to four days of camping, crafting, flying, challenges and lot of nice talks with like-minded people. Website: http://www.landkamp.de Watch this video for some impressions of last year:

The latest project, a tiny Y6 hexrotor, is airborne...! I am really happy with the results, the copter is great fun to fly. Here is a video of it (it seems to be really hard to film it in flight...): Shrediquette BOLT from W. Thielicke on Vimeo I will use it mainly for FPV. The little thing becomes pretty fast for its size, it is very precise and fits through the smallest holes... It does even fly pretty ok when one propeller is missing.   Some details on this copter (more pictures on the BOLT page ): BOLT: Compact Y6 FPV hexrotor / hexacopter Max. dimension 21 cm Motor shaft distance 10.6 cm Roxxy 1815/25 Airace propellers "CCD-Killer" CMOS FPV camera mGUIDE controller Turnigy Plush 6A ESCs + I²C->PWM micro converters 3S 1000 mAh battery

Some days ago, a director from NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) contacted me because he saw my cameroon video in the internet. NHK has a program called "Tokudane Toukou Doga", where interesting internet videos from all over the world are shown with some comments from the film-makers. They wanted to introduce my video and also asked for a small interview via Skype. As this promised to be quite some fun, I agreed of course :-D The NHK show can be found here: http://nhk.jp/doga/?375190    My hexacopter part is from 01:35 - 04:00