Building a personal, camera equipped drone is pretty cool
and would have been a lot of fun. You could even start a small (or eventually
big) business from the hobby if so inclined.
Engineer Paul Wallich goes into considerable detail about how he constructed a 1kg, remotely
controlled quadcopter with built in camera. He even discusses off-the-shelf flight control software.
So what did he use it for?
Redefining helicopter parenting by following his grade school (I’m guessing 7 – 10 year old)
son 400m to the bus stop. He then laments that power restrictions prevent him
from following the bus all the way to school.
He used to walk his son to the bus stop, but in that much
caricatured geeky way, seems to prefer social contact be mediated through a
machine interface.
Is there something wrong with trusting your son to walk the
400m to the bus stop, then get on the bus and arrive at school by himself? What
do you think might happen to him? I reckon the novelty of the copter overhead
will pretty quickly give way to resentment at being watched. You’ll be beaming
neuroses directly into him from the copter’s RF unit.
The sheer number of parents who either drive or walk their
kids the short distance to our local primary school astounds me. Why don’t you
just teach your molly coddled brats basic safety precautions and let them walk
to school or the bus stop by themselves? We all used to.
How will these children ever learn to think and act
independently? To assess and handle risks in a balanced manner? Oh, that’s
right … we don’t want them to in our cradle to grave nanny state.
It would have been much funnier had he built the copter out of a dead cat.
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