 I was going to intro this, but what comes up says it all. All right. Thank you guys for coming. This is build your own UAV 2.0, wireless mayhem from the heaven. My name is Michael Wagan. I'm from the United States Military Academy, West Point, and I'm with... I'm Render Man. I'm just a nice guy, so I don't have quite the title he does, but you don't believe me. Hey, so we want to keep the energy up today. So let's show a little intro movie. Render, what time were we up last night? I think we finally got things going just after midnight. After midnight? Yeah. And where were we? We were just up the strip at the Hilton Grand Great Whatever Resorts that was there. More correctly, the parkade that's right across there, about the 13th floor of said parkade. Yeah, there's no cameras up there, by the way. And so after these guys spent a great deal of time and energy trying to get the plane up and running, some unforeseen technical difficulties got in the way we had to do our proof of concept of something. So yeah, basically my iPhone went for a flight. So as you see by the video, it was a very interesting flight. So let's go ahead and roll this tape here. Are we rolling? I think we're minimized. You're going to need audio in the laptop. Some audio? Oh, the gods are coming after us. There's a reason you don't see a plane on the stage right now. But yeah, my phone went for a 400 foot free fall inside of the Styrofoam plane. Now we did recover. We'll show you the damage a little later on. But all right, let's get back to business. Real quick. I mean, the slide speaks for itself. So, Brenda, you have a service announcement to make, right? I do. Yes. The Fs, the 3 Fs. Oh, yeah. Anybody who's here from the FAA, FCC, or Apple warranty departments, please identify yourselves. If security could escort them. If you are in the crowd and you must be out there, we are not answering your questions. Okay, so real quick, let's do a little technology overview. We've all heard about them. What are they? All right, so UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles. We know they're pilotless aircraft, right? We've all heard of the predator drone in combat war zones and everything. But what makes a UAV a UAV versus an autonomous UAV, et cetera? So autonomous, we all know autonomous means it's a self-governing vehicle. It has no pilot, no human interaction whatsoever. Autopilot vehicle doesn't necessarily mean that a plane's autonomous. It just means that there's not a human being up there. So no pilot necessary, per se, in the airframe. Predator drones, for example, can't be remotely piloted or they can be set to basically run an autopilot. Much like, and I guess this is kind of scary, any plane that you flew on to get over here. Chances are your pilot just took off, hit that red button and put his feet up on the dash. And start pulling that back on the off switch. Yeah, gotta watch that red button there. But yeah, so most planes these days are capable of autopilot features. But what makes a unmanned aerial vehicle autonomous is that it doesn't require any human interaction for the entire duration of the flight. It has higher level intelligence. It can predict weather patterns, alter its flight plan according to numerous criteria. It can make decisions like a human being can. An autopilot, as you can imagine, simply just flies a pre-programmed route. Now these UAV systems, they range from medium to large scale systems. And what we're gonna show you today are basically what you can do if you have $1,500, $2,000, you want to go out, spend some time, experience some heartbreak like we did last night and build your own system. That was more the abject terror when we were seeing blinking police car lights in the distance. The plane hits the ground and like sure enough, whoop whoop, and right down the street we're like, should we go get this or? Render, did you wipe your prints? Yeah, I forgot about that part. Okay, so if you guys were interested in going out in the market, and I'll talk on my slides, keep breaking, and you wanted to build your own system. Now we're down at the DIY level, there are a whole series of complete autopilot solutions for model airplanes. All the way down to the bottom is the ArduPilot project, that's probably the cheapest one that I've come across yet. The original board was $25. Now it's just a microcontroller, it's just an Arduino that's been modified for UAV purposes. Honestly that's more than enough to get a plane to fly autonomously, or pseudo-autonomously, you still have to take off and land, but you give control over to it and it flies basically whatever you program it. Now they've since graduated to an Arduino Mega that they've modified for purposes and I guess kind of not too creatively called their new board ArduPilot Mega, but there's some other boards out there as well. The UAV DevBoard, the Paparazzi project, that's an open source, Linux-based autopilot project, FlexiPilot, Easy UAV, getting more into the more expensive commercial products for small scale models, we have Autopilot, and then you see up in the red, those are systems that cost over $1,500 and frankly are kind of out of my student budget, so I didn't really focus on those much. But the point is that if you have a little bit of change and you have the interest, there's a whole bunch of ready-made solutions out there that you can integrate into airframes. So continuing on with our UAV tech demo, basic flight characteristics. So an unmanned aerial vehicle is a plane essentially. They can also be helicopters, they can be, I don't know what else there is, but I've seen some crazy stuff. I've even seen a flying lawnmower. Take it for what it's worth, but all UAVs share a couple things in common. They all have to fly, they all have to navigate, and they all operate some type of payload. So flight, we know any type of flying body is affected by four forces up in the air. You've got lift, weight, or gravity, thrust and drag affecting that body that's moving through air, which essentially is just a fluid. And so when we're flying, we have to both stabilize the platform and we also have to take into account air speed and maintain some semblance of altitude, unlike what we did last night. So once we have the flying piece and the plane's actually in the air, then we need to somehow control it. We want to give it direction, because we want it to go where we want it to go. So that's where the navigation piece comes in handy. And we'll talk in a moment about the different components that make this really easy and cheap to perform. And then third, putting a UAV up in the air, all right, that's cool. We now have this object that can fly around wherever we want it, but what if we wanted to do something? Now, I'm sure many of you out there can think of all kinds of creative applications for a plane that can fly by itself, but we want to operate some type of payload, so maybe we want to do some sensing missions like we were last night, checking out who left their blinds open on the Vegas Strip, or hey, maybe we want to do some sniffing operations. We want to, I don't know, I want to follow Renderman as he sees all the sites around Vegas, and he just happened to leave his iPhone 802.11 on, uh-oh. Maybe we want to send some live video back like we were doing, use an RF, shoot, maybe we want to put a laser up there. And I'm sure you guys can think of all kinds of other applications. We'll actually talk about some more payloads a little later on. Okay, so stabilization. This is traditionally one of the more difficult aspects of flying in general, but fortunately because of the state of the industry, coming off the shelf parts, they have the price for these components has dramatically dropped. There's essentially two very simple, easy, and inexpensive ways to stabilize any type of model airframe. The first is the thermal pile sensor approach. This essentially is a two-axis thermal pile sensor board, which senses the infrared difference between the sky and the ground. I'll show you next slide. They're really easy to use. They're extremely cheap, 40 to 60 bucks. And almost all weather conditions and terrain environments, they're more than enough. Now given they don't work so well on blizzards or in very dense fog and mountainous urban terrain like we are here in Vegas. For your average application, it's more than enough. And then the other method is the inertial measurement unit. Essentially, you're taking three accelerometers or gyroscopes, and each one of them is on axes with one of the three planes. And then using some calculations in math, we can essentially sense every change to that airframe as it moves in three-dimensional space. And so that way we have a pretty good idea of its current orientation. These systems are becoming cheap. They're more complex and a little bit difficult to work with, but at the moment there are autopilots that are using just IMUs that are relatively inexpensive, and we can continue to see this drop in the next couple of months specifically. So the thermal pile based approach. This is my favorite because, again, it's the cheapest, hey, anything that's cheap is good with me. And also for me, so far it's been the most fail-safe. Except when you don't have hot glue. When it falls off the airframe and it's dangling in the slipstream, it doesn't work so well. Go figure. But usually we just put this little black box. This is an FMA co-pilot 4 sensor. I think it's 60 bucks or 70 bucks from FMA Direct. And we were supposed to hot glue this to the top, but we didn't have any hot glue. So we figured double-sided sticky tape from CVS would be enough. So it falls off and it's seeing the horizon do this and everything, and the autopilot is doing exactly what it was supposed to and trying to keep it level. Unfortunately, when the horizon is doing this, that's kind of hard, and gravity is a harsh mistress. I submit that it was actually keeping it level to what it was sensing, but... Just so you all know, we tested it, gravity still works, it's still good. And the iPhone survives. Amazing. So you guys can kind of see one sensor will face the ground when the wings are tilted left, right, or forward, backward, and the other sensor will see more of the sky. The sky in the infrared spectrum is always colder than the ground, even when it's covered with snow and ice like it normally is in Northern New York, where I'm holed up most of the year. So we know that in almost all weather conditions, this works pretty nicely. This gives us a horizon sensing capability. It's very easy to work with, writing your own custom code, because it gives you a nice little even distribution like you see in the bottom. And we essentially just want to minimize the error between the opposite sensors and two axes. And so we just give out control outputs to the elevator, which is going to make it go up and down, nose up and down, or to our ailerons or rudder, depending on our airplane configuration, which is going to make it tilt left and right like you see our fighter jet here. So very simple. Servos. So the airplane, the whole servos are relatively simple to many of you, but I actually found these a little complicated when I got started. Servos have become pretty advanced in recent years. For $12 or $13, you can get this HS-55. It's an extremely small, extremely lightweight servo that is able to swing its arm to a very specific direction given a PWM or pulse width modulated signal. So on the bottom left you see with a minimum pulse, a neutral pulse, or a maximum pulse, it will swing the arm to a given direction. It provides a lot of torque, very fast response time, and they're very reliable. Did I mention they're really inexpensive? So as you can see, the servo, it's essentially just a motor and it has a potentiometer and a control circuit on there. You just feed it five volts and in the PWM signal and it's good to go. The servos are what we use to control all the control surfaces on the plane. The ailerons, the rudder, the elevator. When you're flying home, if you get one of those awesome window seats, I'm a fan of window seats, and you look out to the left and you kind of see that aileron going left, right, trying to keep the plane flat. Well, essentially- I love how you say trying. Trying. It probably does a little bit better job of this than I do. But they don't use hot glue. Epoxy, right? So the servos just let us move all our control surfaces. All right, then autopilot systems. So I mentioned that there's a whole range of autopilot systems. Some of my favorites, though, are the microcontroller-based systems like the ArtuPilot Mega Board you see right there. It's actually sold by sparkfund.com for 50 or 60 bucks right now. It doesn't include all the pins. And once you add some of the other sensors that you need, it comes out to about $200. But that very small board right there is literally all you need. It's just a modified Arduino Mega. The Paparazzi project, I'm a serious fan of because all the source code, much like the ArtuPilot project, is completely open source. But they've been around a little bit longer. So I feel like there's sources. It's better developed. It's far better commented. And the Paparazzi will work on Linux operating system, which I'm a fan of because any time you can make the plane run on Linux, I mean that's Take it for what it's worth. Unleash the flying penguins. Penguins do fly, I promise. So future work, the Beagle board in the bottom right is a $150, painting three equivalent computer that fits in your hand. This is one right here. It's just a single board computer. Runs any Linux distribution that you flash to an SD card. And it has, I think it runs at 750, something megahertz. So it's got plenty of processing power. USB connectivity, it's beautiful. So future work is taking the Beagle board and maybe developing our own autopilot framework right on it just because we can. Telemetry. So it's really nice now that we have the plane is actually flying, it's stabilized. We have the autopilot that's given it some intelligence. It can fly waypoints and whatnot with the hardware that we just saw. But what if we actually want to interact with it? We want to see what it's doing. We want to see its current airspeed, altitude, next waypoint. Maybe we want to push data to it, reroute its flight plan, et cetera. So we need a way to communicate it with it. XBs and ZigBees have been on the market now for a couple of years. They're an 802-14-5 system and they work beautifully. They're essentially a wireless serial link. They're very easy to program with Digi's XCTU program. And with the 900 megahertz EXE modems, you can get out to the 12, maybe 15-mile range depending on your antenna setup and whatnot. Line of sight, a few other things. Yeah, line of sight is usually helpful. But with the RPSMA connectors on the end, we can essentially plug any antenna that we like in this. So we can really beam traffic out pretty far. So we know that we can touch it. And in many cases, we can reach back pretty reliably. Cellular is actually really becoming popular in the DIY drones community because it's a higher bandwidth, easier way to network your UAV up in the air. So say we put our Beagle board on the plane. We just plug in one of these relatively inexpensive USB cellular devices, pick your vendor, Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T. And now we have our Beagle board on the internet. Now I'm sure you guys can imagine what we can do with that. But if we have a plane flying in the air and it's networked, then we have unlimited range as long as we're within the cell network. And hey, now I can play with this across the planet too. I don't necessarily have to be in the same state. So that's pretty easy. The video feed. Unfortunately, our video feed was a little shoddy. That's because I was using my $30 camera and not my actually better $18 camera. But in the upper left-hand corner, you see a board camera. These are really inexpensive CCD board cameras. They're awesome. I mean, they see near IR. You saw a night flight. That's not some night vision system. That is a board camera. I mean, no joke, $30. It doesn't get better than that, really. Not without a whole lot more money. Yeah. Now you give me a lot of money. I'm sure we could do better, but yeah. But then there's a whole selection of transmitters out there. If you have your ham radio license, then you have more band privileges. And there's all kinds of stuff you can do. I've got a ham radio license. I encourage many of you to get it as well. For no other reason than because you get the band privileges. But using the ham radio bands, we can push video feed out. But pretty much as far as we can go, you have a lot of band privileges. And you can roll your own system. So what I'd like to learn to do sometime soon is I want to roll my own 434 megahertz video system and see just how far I can push out a reliable video feed. Because as you saw, it kind of gets a little bit fuzzy. Right now on the ground, we're using a directional antenna. It's spotty, to be honest. GPS. So the plane, obviously known as current location, that's kind of an important feature. Many of our phones now have GPS receivers. So you can only imagine how small they are. What you see here are actually really high end GPS devices that literally fit in the palm of your hand. They're about the size of a quarter each. A 10 hertz refresh rate down to, on average, 2 to 3 meter resolution. GPS receivers only going to cost you about $80. So that's freaking awesome. An airframe. All right, so now we have all these devices. We can get our plane up in the air. So what do we put them in? Well, I recommend a foam model. Go out there, go online, and find a foam model airplane. And modify it. It makes a really good iPhone case. It does. It will protect the iPhone. Promise. At least from 400 feet. Brenda, you want to talk about some of the benefits of foam? Definitely. Having seen this thing in action for the first time last night, I've seen all sorts of videos and pictures and stuff. It's light. It's cheap. Damn near disposable. So we plowed this thing into an RV park, into the parking lot. At 25 miles an hour. Yeah, 25 miles an hour. And yeah, it's pretty trashed. But a bit of glue, some tape, you can put it back together. But also, for the most part, if you plan your installation of all the electronics correctly or sanely, you could basically, OK, airframes trashed. Another $800 bucks, get another one, just transplant everything, and you're good to go again. So you could afford to be a little bit stupid with the thing. It's going to cost you a little bit, but not the $20,000 at some of the real professional stuff. That's a double-sided tape. Costs us about $100 bucks last night, didn't it? How about, well, what's your time worth, too? Get include that. Not much, so it's all right. So some community-proven airframes. If you guys go online, there's a large DIY UAV community. It's at diydrones.com and also rcgroups.com. There's a really active Make It Yourself UAV community there. A lot of people have agreed that these two airframes here, the easiest to are on the left and this unknown manufacturer, Skywalker on the right, are some awesome airframes. Last night, we were flying with the Skywalker. This thing's $100 bucks. You kind of buy it on eBay or through some shady reseller. And it comes from China in a nice little crumpled box. But it's all good. I mean, it works. And in the models, they carry a lot of weight. Again, they weigh nothing. They're practically disposable. So as long as you can retrieve it at the end of the day and pull your electronics out, you can be up and flying again in a couple of hours. And actually, one of the best things about foam is that we can repair these. Say, literally, the wing snaps in half. I think we have some videos of it should have happened, had it not been a foam model. But you just take some gorilla glue that you get from Home Depot and some water and let the foam, I'm sorry, let the glue foam up a little bit and then adhere that foam together. And the glue connection is stronger than the foam itself. So from any amount of damage, and I'm speaking from personal experience, you can glue and tape an airplane back together and somehow get it up in the sky. So let's show a real quick build log of what I do when I get my new EasyStar. So I get the EasyStar. I pull it out of the box. And this is the foam fuselage that I see. It splits in half just like this. And you can see all the interior space and whatnot. I upgrade the motor. I don't use any of the stock components. This is a brushless motor that runs at about 14,000 RPM at normal voltage. It's been in a 7-inch prop and actually provides an enormous amount of thrust. So much that even when the plane is fully loaded, we can accelerate almost vertically. And also in the bottom there, you see that device that says 36. That's an ESC or an electronic speed controller. That essentially is what our battery plugs into and essentially is like a throttle for our motor. It also provides power to the receiver and to our other electronics on the plane. So I make some incisions and kind of route this through. And a lot of hot glue to kind of keep everything put in there. And then I throw the receiver in, which is that other box that you see. Start connecting up the wires. I didn't show there's an outside photo. The servos literally slide in the side. And we connect the push rods and everything that control the servo arms to the control surfaces. And at that point, we're pretty much ready to go. We just have to drop a payload in. So we do that. Payload, bingo, camera, pan-tilt mount underwing, so it won't get ripped off when it crash. And we're finished. I mean, too easy. And you see that black box on top? That time, it was hot glue done. And that suspicious-looking antenna out the front, that is the video transmitter. But, I mean, who knows what it really could be, so. All right, movie time, rendership. Let's show some movies. Show one of the more successful ones. One of the more successful ones? Okay. So this is over somewhere in Southern California. Just ignore those lights that you see in the sky. That's not air traffic or anything. And so when we have the plane stabilized and the autopilot turned on, it just gives it rudimentary left and right control, basically. Stabilization system just keeps it flat level and we just kind of fly a route. The camera you see panning and tilting according to the ground user, he's wearing a gyroscope attached to a helmet or a hat and he's wearing video goggles. So it's like he's sitting in the plane. It's a really cool sensation. It's made a couple people sick. It's made a couple people fall over. I got thrown up on once. And basically wherever you look, it's like you're sitting in this little foam plane and the camera looks and you're there. There's more little dots in the sky. Stars. Yeah, that's it. New thing stars. Stars. In line. Nice cyclical line. So this is Southern California from the sky at night. And again, remember this is just a $30 board camera. The CCD lenses or the CCD imagers actually see near IR. So especially when there's all this light pollution from street lights and buildings lit up, I mean, we can see very nicely in the dark. That's you guys down there, I think. Yeah, we're trying to wave at some point. Yeah, you can see the vehicles, you can see those people. That's a pretty decent amount of... Let's fast forward a little. Come to Berlin. Actually, I wonder... Is this our interesting movie? This is. Yeah, okay. We thought it'd be really cool for you guys. We thought it'd be really cool if we flew between some buildings. You can see the trees in the courtyard. And then my friend's like, hey look, a traffic cone. So we decided, you know, we're gonna bring it back. We were actually having problems initially with our electronic speed controller was overheating and it happens to just cut the motor out at some point, which is not really behavior that we wanna see when we're up in the air and we don't have any idea it's happening. So we decided, you know, we'd kind of bring it back. Render, can you point out that building in the bottom right? Yeah, this building here. That building right there, yeah. Okay, we'll talk about that in just a second. Yep, wait for it, wait for it. I'm actually gonna turn the sound on so we can hear something kind of unique here. There it goes. No motor. And back again. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the sound of UAV death. So that building that we saw there, that was the LA Clippers main office and training facility. Now my friends and I, you know, we get in the car, we go drive over there. We're like, all right, we think the plane's around here somewhere. So it's still transmitting video at this point. We have no way to remotely turn it off. So, you know, we get out of the car, we got this giant patch antenna and we're doing this the whole time. I think it's over here, man. Nope, right. So anyways, we walk around this building back and forth, back and forth. At some point, one of my friends is like, dude, it's on the building. No, it's not on the building. Okay, well, let's get on the building. So we go over to, you know, to the front door and it's actually got some pretty impressive security. We notice as we walked around, there's about five cameras on every side. We were like, hmm, did you, like, who works here? So we walk to the front door and we're like, oh shoot, LA Clippers, hmm, that's a basketball team, right? So we're like, all right, well, they gotta have night security. So we go up to the front door, there's all these things. And we're looking at this, we're trying to figure out like how to press the doorbell. And there's this giant thing and we open it up. Can you just imagine like a half a dozen geeks standing there trying to figure out how to operate a doorbell? I wish I could have been there. This was bad. Well, we figured out there isn't actually a doorbell. There's a fingerprint scanner though. And we were like, whoa, dude, cameras, fingerprint scanner. And then as soon as we did that, this giant light like just beams up and we couldn't see anything. And then we noticed, oh my God, that's a camera. Facial recognition. I'm not kidding, guys. I asked them about it the next morning. So we were like, all right, we're out of here. We're not climbing. We're not scaling this building, not with all this. And so the next morning I come back and they just opened up and I'm walking in next to some giant basketball player it's like twice my size. I was like, hi. He's like, hello, little man. What are you doing? I'm just here to see the secretary. Okay, she's over here. So some basketball player walks me to the front desk and this lady, she's typing away at her computer and she looks up. She's like, hi, can I help you? I'm like, yeah, I'm from the army and I lost. And you see, the best I can ever use is I'm from the internet and that just doesn't have the same clout, so. Yeah, so we lost this experimental drone on your roof last night. Oh my God. You would not believe the week I'm having. We're trying to get Kobe to come here and I don't think it's gonna work out. So I am so not surprised this drone landed on the roof. What's a drone? I just like to point out, I have an empty cup here. Oh, the man in the front with the flask. Well done, sir. This is what I think it is. 1928 Bolshevik vodka. I'm not gonna get a security clearance after this. You expected one. So they led me up on the roof. We get the plane back. The batteries were, you know, we're dead. Yeah, thank you, sir. And we got it back. We actually had it up in the air the next day and this is the footage that we took. If you can see, but, is it really that bad? It tastes like revolution. Well done, sir. So I just want to point out, again, with a $30 camera, we can, you know, we can see shrubbery individually. We can, you know, and again, this is up high enough that you can't see it. Well, unless you're really looking for it, but you certainly can't hear it. And I think there was a soccer game going on. We were trying to count how many people were playing on the either side. You might be able to see it. It should be right in the center of the screen next to that seashell thing that's in the middle. We're checking that out, too. Turned out to be a bandstand. Who knew? Seashell, bandstand. But yes, this is about typical. Let's cut this back to the slideshow. Render, what happened there? I thought we took this off. I thought so, too, but I guess we should address it anyways. Okay, so some of you know this. Many of you don't. I'm currently working at DARPA for Mudge. Everybody clap it up for Mudge, thank you. I'm so ignorant. I actually didn't know who Mudge was until I showed up there. And, oh, I'm sorry. I'm very young, all right? Oh, okay. I'm gonna pull the age card on that. But he sits me down in his office the first day and he's got all these locks on his desk. And I'm like, whoa, all right, really? So I sit down. He just folds his hands across his desk and doesn't say anything. And there's this person in the corner. It's just scribbling notes. Just looking down, scribbling notes, looks up. Gives me the stinky eye, looks down. I'm like, wow, this is kind of creepy. So he just kind of, you know, motions through the locks and I take the hint, you know, are I at lock picking? Thank God I learned this at tool. And so I cracked a couple of locks and then we start talking. Well, a couple days later we were doing the same thing again, we're talking in his office and I was talking about my UAV and you know, we were just brainstorming like crazy ideas. And you know, I was like, man, I wonder how much it costs to put like a rocket on my plane. He's like, you know what? Why are you still here? I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, I don't want to see your face again until I see a rocket on this plane. I was like, get out of here. Like, come back with some footage. Don't do anything stupid. For varying degrees of stupid, I mean. There are varying degrees of stupid. So here's our candid shot. You see on the left we've got a camera on the right, we've got a missile. What does this look like, right? And at this point I'm getting an email afterwards saying, dude, I start to rocket to the thing. And I'm like, do I still want to be involved in this? Audio, yes. All right, so I'm going to show you a couple of different tries here, because this did take a couple. Yeah, try shooting that down. Bring it, FBI. OK, I think we're rolling around here. So as you can see, try one didn't go so well. It actually got stuck on the rail system. So who knew that just, you know, bent aluminum rods? Like, yeah, it doesn't work so well when the angle's not right. So I covered the plane, put it up again. This is try two. Try two. Try two is a little more interesting. Come on, baby. Running around, nice and slow. Line up, line up on target. Ready, target, stand target. Yeah! Get some! And try three is much of the same, but do I have a... Yeah, let's go back to the slides real quick. We'll show you the damage. The damage done. A little bit significant. Unintentional, of course. Going back, going back. OK. Five. Oh, come on, dude. Really, Gates, really? OK. The candid movie. Damage. I'll let you read this real quick. Not that any of you have ever seen that particular setting on a fire extinguisher. So I think it was in my third or fourth go, because I was really getting into this at this point. I decided, man, it'd be really cool if I could do some shaft, you know? I could spoof another rocket and whatnot. Maybe, yeah, they're coming in to get me. And, oh, shaft, yeah. Spoofed you rocket, man. And so I went into the kitchen and I'm looking around like, all right, aluminum foil, OK, scissors. So I cut up all these little tiny balls of aluminum and I pack them in the Zestis rocket. And I thought, all right, this is going to be cool. So I launched this and, you know, I don't have any good ideas of starting like that. Yeah, that should be cool. So if any of you are from the east, show of hands from the east coast. East coast in the head down. All right. Woo! East coast. So it's been really hot in the east coast, much like Vegas. We're not used to it. Turns out all the grass is dead. And turns out the hay field itself is dry. Oh, my God. So we fire this rocket. I fire it. I fire it. Oh, my God. So we fire this rocket. I fire this rocket, sorry. I'm not going to put this off on you. No, that's not a real problem. Into a hay field. And who knew that the aluminum would be like burning embers as it came out of the rocket? Not quite what I envisioned. So, yeah, that's how that went down. So my involvement in this was purely by email and some phone conversations. No, I'm in Northern Canada. I'm 2,000 miles away. And he's hanging out at West Point, not a place that I could just wander onto. Just throw me off under the bus, man. Really? No, I'm just talking about logistics of things that's a little hard. But as soon as I saw this, I'm like, first thing I'm thinking, we need to get Kismet running on this thing. We had some wireless sniffing with this thing. But I started thinking beyond that. I'm like, okay, so we got a wireless sniffer. What do we do with it? Yeah, warflying has been done. But we got something with GPS that can move on its own. We're getting signal data from a device. Basically, you can put all that together and you start looking at things like the Beagle board that's like a Pentium 3. It's got enough brains. You can start feeding all of this in. And like you were saying earlier, if you had an iPhone that's sitting in their beaconing, you could track that. And basically, by the strongest signal, each GPS location just have it circle that, do samples and just hover over somebody as they're walking through the courtyard or something. I think that's kind of cool. It's also a little terrifying. But there's other things like, all right, we'll strap an AP to this thing, have it do de-off attacks, fly it over a place, put in something like AirDrop and just drop Apple devices or whatever. But again, that's just annoyance kind of stuff. I started thinking about this more. And there's things like Open BTS, they basically open source cell tower that you could do with this. You could use this thing as a communications relay. And this has the major advantage over a model helicopter that it deals with the wind. It's self-stabilizing. You just have this thing doing a circular pattern over where you are. And you've got a communications relay, whatever frequencies you want to use, whatever system. You could do this. So you open mesh if you wanted to get network up and over a hill. Place the infrared camera with forward-looking infrared. You've now got something that search and rescue would love to have. And I actually had a few messages exchanged with Noid, one of the security guys, whose day job is search and rescue. And he was giving me all sorts of stuff. They loved this thing to do. The safety beacon tracking and stuff like that. There's no reason that we're already what a $1,500, $2,000 budget give or take. Yeah, that's disposable, right? And that's just for the base station, all the radios and everything. After that, your new airframe is like $100. So search and rescue to have something like this. They can just fire up to get a mile or two ahead of them to get some video back as to what's going on. There's some serious utility in that. One of the other things I was looking at was strapping like a high-res steel camera. Like these guys are doing the curvature of the air shots with the balloons, the CHDK hacked Canon cameras. Strap something like that into the camera, pointing down. You're flying over a disaster. You could get damn near real-time high-res images of what's going on. Bring that back, slap the SD card in. You now have, you know, stitch it all together. You've now got basically aerial reconnaissance of your situation. I mean, even in more pedestrian things, if you're trying to sell a piece of land or something like that, you want to show how big it is or what the terrain is like. Throw something like this up and you can take pictures and do all that. It's well within the realm of the everyman. I can honestly say that, like, how many of you are familiar with Sahana? It's an open-source disaster relief package that was after the tsunamis in Southeast Asia. Basically, it's for tracking who's where, allocation of resources, all sorts of stuff. Something like this where you could put in real-time imagery of places you haven't gotten to yet so that guys who are going there know what's coming up over that next hill. That's insanely useful. There's wonderful stories by the open-street map guys when the earthquake in Haiti where they didn't have good map support of prints. So Google and everybody else released all their satellite imagery for free to these guys. They put it out, crowdsourced it where people could basically take this satellite imagery, trace out the streets, get some expatriates that knew, okay, that's the street name. Within a few days had a really good map that you could load onto a Garmin GPS and go. Because all these disaster people coming in had, like, you know, there's one main road that's all their GPS has had. So the ability to have, you know, for the normal cost of, like, $20,000 for a pro drone to be able to do 20 of these things, cover a massive amount of space, give them to anybody who wants them, they're some serious things. So I'm going to be pursuing a bunch of these things over the next period of time here to try to see what can we strap to this thing and how can we make this thing useful. So I'm not going to confirm nor deny that we may have put all kinds of really shady wireless stuff on a plane and, you know, maybe we're working on stealing GSM traffic at the handshake using a plane. But let's show you some Vegas flight imagery. This was yesterday. That's just proving that the airframe is very flexible right there. This was last night. Yep, one more last night. That's the disaster. This is in an RV campground, right, to the hotel that this thing came plowing down in and all the locals came out and were like, what the hell is this thing? But what I'd like to show you guys, so we flew Renderman's iPhone last night and what did we get with that? 172 access points in the, what, we were in there for what, 45 seconds or so? What originally, it was because they were trying to get this thing running, this Beagle board with three sniffer dongles on it, but it was a case of couldn't get it to work in the time so it's like, all right, fire it up, strap it in, let's go. We actually had a power issue. We couldn't supply enough amps to it because our five volt regulator was overheating and literally just, you know, kind of messed up the bad, pretty bad. So I just want to show you guys real quick demo. This is our Beagle board with all kinds of nefarious things that we're neither going to confirm nor deny exist. Thank you very much, Mike Hirschhoff. And once this boots up, you'll see it just automatically goes in the sniff zone. So you know how Google was rolling around doing their whole street view thing where they were stealing Wi-Fi traffic? Well, now we're flying around doing the same. And not only that, but if your home network just happens to be WPA encrypted, well, it's not anymore. And there we go. So yeah, if anybody has any devices on in the room, you are on screen. And so some other really interesting issues are like driver. That's not part of the demo. Some other really interesting things that we want to look into, especially concerning the search and rescue or for nefarious purposes, are actually radio direction finding to either cell phones or 802.11 devices. If you're some hikers, you get lost. Search and rescue just puts a plane up. Search beacons, they can say, okay, yeah, you're obviously not in this area or something. I mean, you've got to think if there's a plane crash or something like that. I mean, yeah, firing a rocket's cool, but pretty much the same thing could be adapted to drop smoke so a rescue helicopter knows where to land. That's useful. And also we think that it'd be really cool if we could host our own cellular network on the fly wherever we happen to be, and quite literally on the fly when you think about it. We'll talk to Chris Padgett afterwards. We really do need to get with him. But we'd like to take his system and put it on the plane because, again, imagine the Haitian disaster. What if, you know, all the comms are down? You just put a plane up and boom, you got a cell tower up in the sky, and it has persistence. So let's go ahead. We'll play some more movies real quick. Play some video and take some questions here. Yeah, any questions? With the Chinese unknown manufacturer model, I'm guessing about three pounds is about as much as I put on there. If you put a larger engine on there, I mean, really, you could probably bump that up even more. It's just a matter of how much money do you want to dump into it. Second? Okay, so flight time's dependent on weather conditions, weight, configuration, and a whole mess of other issues. But right now with really inexpensive lithium polymer cells and those high efficiency motors, you're looking at in excess of an hour, especially if you're just cruising. We put some solar cells on there. We optimize the airframe. Maybe we build our own so it's a powered glider. We can stay up there even longer. Okay, guys. Yeah, the altitude? We'll take some more questions later. We'll be in the other room across the hall for... Thank you. Appreciate it.