The Transforming Drone You Can Build at Home
Is it a drone or a car? Yes. Mercury can drive on the ground or take to the skies on command. Build yours today!
Can’t decide between a drone and an RC car? Do you have plans for a lengthy drone mission that is well beyond what the batteries can handle? Or do you just want a fun new toy to play with? In each of these cases, Mercurius Technologies’ transforming drone called Mercury is worth checking out. It is an open hardware drone that can either fly in the air or drive on wheels on the ground, and it was designed to be easy to build and adaptable.
This unique vehicle is powered by highly accessible and affordable hardware like the Raspberry Pi 5 and an ESP32-S3 microcontroller. A set of four BLDC motors and 8-inch propellers with prop guards get the drone airborne, and a pair of 140KV BLDC motors are used to drive Mercury on the ground, using the custom prop guards as wheels. There are plenty of sensors as well, including a ToF camera, USB webcam, thermal camera, and an optical flow sensor.
A demonstration of Mercury shows it driving along on the ground before stopping, folding up its wheels, then taking to the air as a drone. The transformation process is quick and looks pretty smooth.
All of the models for the 3D prints, the source code, and the design files for the custom printed circuit board are available on GitHub.
R&D, creativity, and building the next big thing you never knew you wanted are my specialties.