If, like me, you've always felt that your books, record collection and years' of otherwise accumulated matter was lacking flight capability, you might be interested in Jasper van Loenen's Drone It Yourself project which turns more or less anything into a quadrotor drone with addition of a few motors and a control unit.
According to van Loenen, all the plastic parts, which include the clamps to attach the motors, can be 3D printed in ABS, with the appropriate files made available on van Loenen's website. The clamps used may not work with more unusually shaped objects, but there's nothing stopping anyone from designing their own custom variants.
In addition to some nuts and bolts, would-be drone masters will need to track down four motors and propellers (two left- and two right-rotating) as well as all the necessary batteries and electronics. Van Loenen has listed the complete set of a requirements in a handy text file. He suggests that there's no particular reason why you shouldn't deviate from the specific parts mentioned, though clearly the final spec will affect performance including, most crucially, its carrying capacity. A video of the DIY shows a bicycle wheel as a UAV, so van Loenen's prototype isn't without muscle.
Being remote controlled, van Loenen notes that strictly speaking this is a UAV rather than a drone, though we agree you shouldn't let that get in the way of a clever name.
You can see the part 3D-printed DIY in action in the video below. We're all quadrotors now.
Sources: Jasper van Loenen, Instructables via Thing du Jour
