Turn Your Smartphone Into a Selfie Drone
Nick Rehm's DroneCase is exactly what it sounds like... a case that turns your smartphone into a drone.
Remember in 2008 when the term "selfie" was derogatory? How quaint in retrospect, now that selfies are the norm. We're at the point where it is more embarrassing to ask a stranger to snap a photo than it is to setup a tripod for a timed photo. But tripod photos get old, as do those taken with selfie sticks. Sometimes you want a more interesting picture. Or heck, maybe you just wish your phone could fly. In either case, you'll want to check out Nick Rehm's DroneCase.
This is exactly what it sounds like: a ridiculous "phone case" (and we're using that term very loosely) equipped with propellers so it can fly like a drone. Set it to hover right in front of you in order to get perfectselfies or pilot it remotely for all of your teleconferencing needs. You get the idea ...it's a flying smartphone.
But while the concept sounds silly, the engineering wasn't trivial. Modern smartphones are sleek and slim, but they're still pretty heavy in terms of typical drone payload capacities. That was further exacerbated by Rehm's choice to make this a bicopter design with only two propellers, which keeps the overall size down. Those two propellers provide vertical thrust, but also pivot forward and backward independently. That lets them provide stabilization and maneuvering, too.
The "phone case," propeller guards, arms, and other mechanical parts were 3D-printed. The thick case contains the battery, flight controller, and the two servo motors that rotate the propeller arms. The brushless DC motors for thrust mount to the ends of the arms, like a conventional drone. The electronic components include a Teensy 4.0 microcontroller development board, SHINA ESCs (electronic speed controllers), a generic MPU-6050 IMU (inertial measurement unit) sensor module, a Stemedu TFmini Plus lidar sensor, and a PX4FLOW optical flow sensor smart camera.
On the software side, this uses Rehm's own open source flight controller software called dRehmFlight VTOL. That runs on the Teensy 4.0 and uses friendly Arduino code.