Snake-charming is old-school badassery, but Vegard Veiset is giving it a modern twist. No, his ukulele-controlled quadcopter doesn’t technically have fangs, but even with propeller guards it could still have a hell of a bite.
The premise is simple; Veiset simply wrote a program that lets his computer recognise uke tones, translate them into simple commands, and shunt them over to the quad. The result is something more tech-demo-y than truly musical, but still a nifty little trick. Especially when the drone gets a little bloodthirsty. A Veiset notes in his write-up on the project:
We can now actually control [the drone] but not perfectly – the quadcopter has more than once been close to hitting somebody in the face!
One of Veiset’s test videos shows exactly what that looks like:
A wild drone can never truly be tamed. [Vegard Veiset via Hacker News]