 Remember the rave parties in the 90s? Me neither. Every now and then there's a project that we start for an episode that just does not go according to plan. And sometimes that means the episode never gets made. And this is one of those episodes that I thought would never get finished. This project has caused me so much frustration. About a year ago, David Vintestal was in town. And David is one of the most talented makers I have ever met. If you can think of it, David can find a way to hack and slash it together. The Dremel Drone episode came out amazing. We had so much fun with that. But another episode that we are working on that same week was this concept for LED props. David got it in his head that it would be really cool to attach LEDs to the tips of the props that we use on our drones. What is the number one problem with quadcopters? It's that you can't see them well enough at night. Yeah, okay. So who's like, let's put LEDs on the props. What's this thing on top right here? Is this? Oh, okay, that's cool. Okay, that looks really cool. Red, white, blue, this. How does this work? Like, so this is a cap. Yeah, and then there's just a little wire. So you have two wires. You have positive and negative. One is acting as a spring on the bottom. So you have the battery. It's contacting there. And then you have a little thing there. So you have the positive wire going out. And just... Ah! So the cap just pushes the wire onto it. Got it. Thanks to the 3D printing lines, that keeps the lid in place. That's cool. So you actually use a defect of 3D printing to your advantage to create GRIPTION. GRIPTION? Yeah, all I like. It was just a random idea. I made some LED blades for the helicopter like 12 years ago. Very simple. Just put LEDs on it. And I mean, it looks amazing, especially on the large helicopters. I thought that should be cool to have on a drone. So you get the proper visuals of that. Don't let Drew fly. The concept was proven. So we built up a bunch of props and had it out to the field to get that epic shot. So we got out there. All the props were lit up. Everything is looking great. The lighting is perfect. We are so excited to do this. We spun up our motors and instantly the props started exploding. There's a problem with small, spinny boys. They spin very, very, very fast on our quads. And the centrifugal force is quite large. The contacts on the battery would move. So it wouldn't contact anymore. So the LEDs would just shut off. I mean, that's how yours failed. The ones that you built, they would fail just by shutting off. The ones that I built exploded and LEDs were hitting people in the leg and the batteries were going flying. Yeah, you have to take care. I wasn't as careful as you. You think that's pretty good? No. You said it was good. I'm messing with you, but it's pretty awful. What? Is it awful? I want to help you understand because David communicates a little differently than we do. Like when David says that's pretty good, he means that's shit. I'll admit, you had a little bit to do with how well they were built. It was not looking good. But some of the other ones, there was some promise. It looks so cool. Okay. Bortex had built a bunch of them that seemed like they were holding up to the idol and to the hover test. But as soon as they really got up to speed, some of the LEDs started going out. It just didn't work. The LEDs were getting ripped off the props. The 3D printed case was just exploding. The prop nut had to go down and tighten down on the prop. And then the battery sat down in on top of the prop nut. Once the battery was in, you couldn't like change the props easily without tearing the whole thing apart. The batteries were coming disconnected. These things were just breaking left and right. Okay, don't. We missed it. We missed our window. This was getting really frustrating. We had spent so many different people's time just hours and hours building these props, trying to get this one shot. After the second time we went out and just failed to get anything impressive with these LED props, I really started to lose enthusiasm for this project. Eventually, we just ran out of time. Eventually, I just made the call that we had to put this project on hold. We had other things that we had to do while people were in town. It didn't happen this trip, but I kind of thought that at some point, we'd pick it back up. Oh, man, it looks so cool spinning. It looks so freaking cool. My name is Sean Morrison. I go by Let's Fly RC on YouTube. So a couple months ago, I decided to take on the LED project and see if I can make it a success. Drew and I were in my shop. We were talking about all the failed projects that Roader Riot hasn't looked at in a while, and one of them came up that was LED props. Drew was really excited about the project, but at the same time, he was a little bit frustrated with it. But I thought that I had a cool idea on how to make it work. Gemfine just came out with a new prop called the floppy prop. These props come in pieces, right? So the blades and the hubs are different pieces, which you have to assemble. And he thought that rather than having to put the battery on top of the prop nut that's holding down a fixed prop, what if you could create a new hub that held the battery to the sides of the prop shaft? Okay, so we've got Sean's second revision of the LED prop. This is our umpteenth version overall, counting all the ones we made before. But this is the latest and greatest version. There's a lot of good things about this. What I'm nervous most about is that it's like two days until Nurk and some other pilots show up in town. So even if this design is good, we've got to build more than just these two. We got to build like 16 of them. So we have multiple sets. I was like, you really want me to do a flip? Yes. You really want me to do a roll? Yes, we have to be able to do these things. Okay, I see the prop separate from the drug. Exactly. Yeah. That's cool. I saw it come off in the air. Okay. Is it totally fine? Yeah. Perfect. That's awesome. We're on to something, dude. That's great. That's a big deal. Heck, yeah. I never thought we'd see the day that these freaking LED props would actually be working, but it seemed like they were working. And at this point, there is nothing left to do but get the shot. So what that means is we had to get some pilots in town. We're gonna pick an evening and go for it. We're gonna try again. So we had all these props together. They were all ready to go. Everybody's in town. As clever as Sean's design was, he still didn't find space in their front on off switch. So what that means is the way that you you close the electrical connection is to assemble the prop. And once the prop is assembled, you're burning the battery, right? You only have so much time before the battery drains. We needed to get this shot. It needed to get done because if I had even if I had to pull the props apart and pull the batteries out, that means that all those props had to be rebuilt again. If the batteries died, we had to rebuild all those props again. We had like $100 in batteries too. And they were all working and plugged in and we were ready to go. And then it started raining. And then finally, all right, let's go. Just jump on the ground. Take this point. We got the perfect opportunity. And once we got the drones in the air, and I was chasing them, it was amazing. It looked exactly like I wanted it to look. We had the LED gates lit up. We had the LED props I was following behind. It looked just like I imagined. This is sick. What I'm seeing is epic. I'm so happy. Sean made that work. And I love seeing the the props in view of the camera. Yeah, I didn't even think about that. It's really cool. It feels more like a simulator now. Thanks to Jim Fenn for providing the props for us. Yeah, it's sounds a bunch of the floppy props which made building these a lot easier because we had split blades links in the description to everybody's channel here. If you guys enjoyed this, please hit the like button. We really appreciate it. We had a ton of fun. Hit the subscribe button for future episodes and we'll see you next time. What are we doing? Do a kick flip.