How To: Cheap Paintball "UAV"

What you'll need:

• $10 video camera off eBay
• Cheap tandem helicopter

First off, I just want to say that this was done completely for fun, and since it was a very small investment I didn't expect nor achieve great results. What it does go to show is that anyone can make a cheap little UAV-like RC drone, and if you decided to scale this up you could probably get some great results. 

Down to business:

1. Remove the video camera's housing (if you're like me and your helicopter doesn't have enough lift to handle the extra materials).

2. Rip a camera internals shaped gap in the bottom of the helicopter's styrofoam hull. Watch out for little wires. Don't be too careful though, this ain't rocket surgery. 

3. If you didn't know where I was going with steps 1+2, well there you go. 

It took me a lot of trial and error just to have the helicopter stay in the air, as the added weight and mangled hull affected the trim greatly. Even now I can't keep the helicopter in the air for long, but you get what you pay for (not a lot). Now that I've done it, somebody perfect it! I'll be posting up a bunch of radio controlled paintball stuff in the next few days, if anybody has anything they want mentioned, let me know!

Head on over to Grey Ops' forums to talk about this and everything else you see on the blog.