Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. Legacy Archives

Shut up and take my money! Hobbyist creates fully-functional Millennium Falcon drone

Add as a preferred source on Google

When you combine two good things, the resulting creation is often more amazing than the sum of its parts. Take pickles, for example. Cucumbers are pretty great on their own, and vinegar isn’t bad either — but when you put the two of them together and let ’em marinate for a while, they create one of the most beloved food items on Earth.

Same goes for quadcopter drones and Star Wars. Separately they’re badass, but together their awesomeness level is off the charts — just take a look at this unbelievably rad Millennium Falcon drone built by YouTuber Oliver C.

Recommended Videos

As you’d expect, the entire thing is custom made. The base drone is a “Prophecy 335” — a quadcopter of Oliver C’s own design, built from the ground up using off-the-shelf parts. To give it the iconic Millennium Falcon look, he made a custom “skin” out of lightweight foam that fits snugly onto the drone’s chassis. It even has working LED thruster lights!

Unfortunately you can’t buy one of these badboys (yet!), as Oliver C hasn’t mass produced them, but you can build one yourself if you feel inclined. Oliver C has posted DIY instructions for both the drone and the Millennium Falcon skin online.

And this is just the beginning. Oliver’s next project — a Tie Fighter drone — is already in the works.

Drew Prindle
Former Senior Editor, Features
Drew Prindle is an award-winning writer, editor, and storyteller who currently serves as Senior Features Editor for Digital…
AI security cameras may soon recognize your walk before they recognize your face
A new AI gait system tracks body motion through skeletal keypoints, aiming at long-range identity checks where face scans and fingerprints fall short.
Security cam

Security cameras are built to look for faces. New research suggests they may soon have another target, the small habits buried in the way someone walks.

A paper published in the International Journal of Reasoning-based Intelligent Systems describes SKDMap-Net as a gait recognition system designed to identify people from walking video, even when the camera doesn’t get a clean look at their face. Instead of relying on a close-up scan, it studies how a body moves from frame to frame.

Read more
A 20-second 3D printer breakthrough comes with exactly the kind of catch science loves
The process can create complex microstructures far faster than some laser-based methods, but full 3D control is still a work in progress.
Aluminium, Smoke Pipe

A 3D printer that can make a structure in about 20 seconds sounds like a lab claim wearing a cape. The clever bit is real. The catch arrives before anyone starts dreaming about instant replacement parts.

University of Utah researchers have demonstrated a holographic 3D printing technique that hardens tiny structures in one exposure instead of building them layer by layer. That one-shot approach could avoid the weak, leaky seams that stacked printing can leave behind. For now, though, this is a tool for microstructures, not a shortcut to printing whatever object pops into your head.

Read more
Amazon is full of copycats and shady brands. This Chrome extension lets you avoid them.
Advertisement, Poster, Text

Shopping on Amazon used to be simple. You searched for a product, compared a few familiar brands, and checked out. These days, it often feels like you're scrolling through an endless parade of names that look like someone leaned on a keyboard before hitting publish. That's exactly the problem Knockoff is trying to solve.

Created by developer Josh Pigford, the Chrome extension doesn't promise to expose counterfeit products or magically tell you what's good. Instead, it tackles something arguably more annoying: the flood of unfamiliar, mass-produced brands that dominate Amazon search results.

Read more