On the first of April we decided (a bit too late) to participate to the April fool festival. This post show you behind the scenes of the Poppy filght videos.
Poppy april fools (Poppy d’avril)
For whose who did not see the videos:
First flight test of Poppy Humanoid (outdoor):
Indoor flight control using Snap!
Behind the scenes
Design
As we decided to do this project at 10am, we were quite in rush of time to do something before the end of the day and therefore do not miss the 1st april…
We decided to make Poppy fly and to do so we started to design propellers which can be attached to the Poppy Humanoid structure.
Fortunately we found very nice rotor blades on Thingiverse:
We modified it to the suitable dimension and added an arm to attach it to the Poppy’s structure:
Of course we try to keep design simple and 3D printable in the time we had. It took 3h for both rotor blade and 4h for the propeller arms.
For the motors, we took one coming from a really old robot, cybot :
Assembly
Once all parts have been printed on our low cost printers, we assembled all together and here is the video of the very first time we turn the system on. We were hidden behind fourniture in case something goes wrong but surprisingly it did not !
Both motors are powered separately with an adjustable power supply.
And BIM our Flying Poppy was ready !
It just took a couple of hour (mainly 3D printing) to hack our black Poppy Humanoid and build this badass version:
Of course, Poppy can’t fly with this system but he looks really cool!
After that we create a small Snap program to contrôl the robot pitch :
Video making
On these pictures you can see how we actually lift the robot during videos 
DIY
As usual in the Poppy project, all our work is open source, so if you want to create your Poppydorak you can download files here :
Also you can find backstage HD pictures (under creative commons) are on our Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/poppy-project/
