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…
A new startup wants to fix the military’s working-dog shortage with cloning and gene editing
Promising pitch, plenty of unanswered questions about the dogs.
a new startup wants to fix the militarys working dog shortage with cloning and gene editing warhound featured image

Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.

Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).

Read more
AI can describe a picture, but it still struggles to understand blind users
A University of Maryland study finds that Be My AI often buries useful answers in lengthy descriptions, leaving blind users to work harder to get the information they need.
Blind Man using walking stick

AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.

The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.

Read more
Etsy cracks down on AI slop listings. Everyone else needs to take note.
Now every platform must decide what counts as handmade.
Etsy featured image

Platforms tend to shrug off AI clutter until it threatens what they sell. For Etsy, that thing is trust in the maker.

To protect that, Etsy has banned AI-generated how-to guides and listings made entirely by bots. Most sellers must show at least one unretouched photo of the item (via Etsy Seller Handbook).

Read more