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From $59 Kickstarter.com Delivery: April 2020e’ve looked at POWERUP’s electrified paper
planes before. In Issue 11, we crash-landed their
DART in our neighbour’s garden, and had great
fun. In short, it’s a motor-and-controller unit for paper
planes that links to your phone via Bluetooth, and lets
you zoom around your local park [Ed – Make sure you comply with
local regulations and are respectful of other people in the vicinity].
Well, they’re back with the POWERUP 4.0, with a couple of new
features: extra sensors and an extra motor. The extra sensors are in
the form of a gyroscope and an accelerometer. These two give you
far more control over the plane than on previous versions (hopefully
this will mean that our neighbour’s veg patch is spared a repeat of its
aerial assault).
The extra motor gives more thrust, and that means that you can use
a wider range of materials to make your planes from – unlike earlier
models that required paper, you can now use foam, balsa wood, or
almost anything else, provided the airframe is under 20 grams.
There are also some improvements to the robustness, with a
carbon fibre frame and rubber bumper on the front.
The POWERUP 4.0 – like previous versions – isn’t the most flexible
way of making a plane. There’s only one controller and, (while you can
download flight data for later processing), no way of interacting with a
flying plane from your own software. The unit is also fixed in one
shape, so your plane has to fit around this.
However, what you lose in flexibility, you gain in ease of use. This
is by far the easiest way of making a powered plane. It’s fantastic fun
to transform folded paper into a flying machine that you can control
from your phone. If you develop your planes to the point that they
hit the limits of the POWERUP 4.0, then you’ll have to move on to
more powerful hardware, and tackle the complexities that come
with that.W
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POWERUP 4.0
Give your paper planes an electric boost