A Homemade Spacecraft (DIY Tech)

Hey guys your host Akib here, I came across this really interesting short documentary about how amateur Engineers and entrepreneurs Kristian von Bengston (worked at NASA) and Peter Madsenin in Denmark are working on a project to build a suborbital spacecraft to carry a human into space and then release a capsule to return the passenger back to safety.

The Team calls themselves Copenhagen Suborbitals, a not-for-profit  which started off  in 2008 and now comprises of  20 plus specialists determined to create the first homemade, manned spacecraft to go into suborbital flight.  The idea is to prove that fact that rocket technology is not something beyond the reach of a common individual. The rockets that are undergoing testing are made from off the shelf components that are easily available to anyone. The project is completely open sourced you can have all the access to information and designs if you want to create your very own spacecraft.

Hexacopter and hexapod union looks like a robotic insect

Hexacopter and Hexapod are amongst  the latest and the most popular remote control robotic toys out there. How about combining them together to create a new walking and flying-walking hybrid machine. I bet you never though of that before. That's what the guys at Mad Lab Industries (MLI for short) have come up with. MLI is a  fresh start up that sells robotic components online and on the side they do cool stuff too.

So the basic idea behind this unnamed project is to integrate a remote controlled Hexapod Robot with a remote controlled Hexacopter. With this idea, they received a PhantomX AX Hexapod kit from Trossen Robotics.

The PhantomX AX Hexapod

Now the integration wasn't an easy task, considering the fact that the PhantomX was originally designed to be tough and was quite heavy to be  taken to the air. So it had to undergo a lot of surgery, the frame originally made of ABS plastic parts had to be replaced with lighter carbon fiber parts. Despite the fact, it was still heavy for it to be taken in the air by a quadcopter. Rather it needed a Hexacopter which has a much greater lifting force and was much stable than a quadcopter. A quadcoptor would have been cheaper considering the fact that it would have reduced the cost of 2 BLDC motors and ESC (Electronic Speed Controller).