How does building a paper airplane that is remote controlled, costs less than $10, and works like a dream sound? Intrigued? So are we – gather your soldering iron, cutting tool, glue and crafting tools or rotary tools and lets get flying.
The project, which was created by Instructables user ‘Imetomi’, cleverly uses your standard television remote as its point of control; no fancy schmancy apps or complicated setups here.
Once built, the way the plane works is simple: if you press any button on the TV remote, the small motor starts to rotate the propeller which causes the plane to accelerate. With the speed of the propeller, you can control the height of the flight and the speed of the plane, using just the TV remote.
As for those who are worried about their paper engineering skills, the project is designed be used with any paper airplane design and the parts only weigh 9 grams total. As for total flight time, the small Li-Poly battery keeps the machine running for approximately 10 minutes – not bad considering that the whole system weighs just 9 grams.
According to Imetomi, the simple build will require the following:
- one small Li-Poly battery
- a piece of PCB electric micro motor with propeller
- a 100uF cpacitor, a 100 ohm resistor
- a 220 ohm resistor
- a red LED
- a BC557 transistor
- an IR reciever 38kHz
- straws
- velcro
- a small piece of plastic
Note: you can replace the resistors with others if you have them laying around so long as the value doesn’t go over 470 ohms.
Once you have the parts gathered, you can check out the full instructions by heading over to the project’s Instructables page.
