Drones4Good Does the Big Bang Fair

 

The IET stand @BigBangFair

Over the last two days we've been demonstrating 3D printing and drone technology to the next generation of engineers and scientists. @TheIET and @UCLEngEdu very kindly gave us space at their stand, so we took a 3D printer and Leap Motion controlled drone simulator up to the NEC in Birmingham.

Flying a drone with your hand

We also 3D printed some butterfly and dragonfly rings, along with some dinosaur models, which we gave out as prizes for answering questions. You can just see a couple of the rings on the printer in the picture above.

A dragonfly printing

Nine butterfly rings printing

Five complete dragonflies

A butterfly ring

What we did this time around was to show the quadcopter simulator with the Lima landscape and explain that it was captured using a drone, with the data then used to 3D print a scale model. We then have the real landscape, made into a computer model, made into a physical model of Lima, but, to complete the cycle, we then 3D printed quadcopters to demonstrate the use of the technology for surveying applications.

A new addition is that we've added a Leap Motion controller to the simulator which allows the drone to be flown by hand movements rather than using gamepad. This was a very good decision for the exhibition environment. When a group of 8 or more school aged children crowded around the table, there were hands everywhere trying to fly. Given the expected ages, we put four Pokemon characters around the landscape for them to find. This proved to be very popular, with prizes going to anyone who could find them. Prizes were also given for the students who came up with the best use of either drone technology, or 3D printing. The aim behind the "find the pokemon" idea was to suggest the use of drones for search and rescue. In addition to this, we had suggestions along the lines of 3D printing body parts, printing houses, delivering packages and flying in space (obviously they can't, but we were next to the space stand, so I could explain how drones fly by accelerating air, action and reaction and four motor control). There were some interesting questions about how 3D printers know which shapes to print, getting into computational geometry and, with one girl who could have only been about 14, she was really interested in maths and asked about network graph theory. I also got to explain aerodynamic stability and control in quadcopters and fixed wing aircraft to a couple of boys who were interested in the full size Hawk and Eurofighter jets that the RAF had parked over at the back. It's all to do with cereal bowls, tea trays and hilltops.

The two pictures above show the Leap Motion controller and simulator. We also spent quite a lot of time explaining how the Leap Motion worked, as comparatively few people had actually seen one before. One interesting thing was that most people didn't realise that the sensor was in the white graphic panel. Watching people trying to fly, a lot of them ended up with their hand over the laptop pad. The main problem we had was when lots of excited children crowded around the table, all trying to get their hand over the sensor to find pokemon. This did tend to confuse it, but then that's only to be expected.

One final thing, but if the venue looks familiar, then that's because it's the same place that we did the UK Drone Show a couple of years ago.

https://www.thebigbangfair.co.uk/
https://twitter.com/UCLEngEdu?lang=en
https://twitter.com/theiet?lang=en