Drone RGB Light Painting

While staying at a party together with friends, we took the opportunity to test out my newly build LED-iluminated Quadcopter.

Before that, i figured out a way to wire all that LED stuff to my drone. I drilled 4 wires (5V+,Gnd,D-in,D-out) together to connect the LED-stripe on every arm. Soldered all the wires, insolated, stripped and plugged into the flight controller.

Thanks to the Betaflight-Crew, it is easy to configure special features like interacting with WS2812 LEDs. In the Betaflight Configurator you can change every single LED color and function.

Finaly at the party, Robert took his Sony ILCE-6300 and made some awesome long time exposure pictures during the sunset and early night. He shot the flight direction of the drone which was controlled by me and my line of sight experience. Here are some impressions:

If you look closely enough at the following picture you can see the drone unexpectedly crashing and recovered by a human.

Update: On February 2021 our article got featured in the c’t Make Magazin 1/2021, S. 62. An online version of the article is available here (Archive 1).