DroneShield

[thefatmoop]

The overall project is Comments are not allowed on the indiegogo site, and comments are disabled on youtube.

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/droneshield/

[jpelczar]

"Help Wanted. Lab assistant. Hard working moronic drone needed to assist genius with experiments." <- it might be for use by that kind of people 

[Kompost]

At first I thought they were going to make a radio receiver that looks for typical RC transmitter signals. That actually might work (with numerous false positives strengthening user paranoia)  Then i saw the operation diagram 

[thefatmoop]

I don't think it would be difficult at all to make an xbee scanner. Have a micro cycle through all the channels and look for serial chat, then see if it's ardupilot chat.

But i don't know how well it would work if the drone xbees were using encryption. And you'd need 2.4ghz S1, 2.4ghz S2, 900mhz to really cover the xbees.

[tom66]

I'd imagine that military drones would use reserved radio bands. This looks to be using audio to detect them; I'm not sure how this works at long distances (if at all?)

[cybergibbons]

I don't get why you'd want to detect Xbee?

[BravoV]

It detects drone's sound using a mic. 

Imagine your neighbor bought one, while you play a "recorded" sound of a true drone, should be fun eh ? 

[bexwhitt]

I suppose it could be made to work with decent equipment but why bother?

[Joules]

Now link it to a robotic airsoft machine gun and you can bring the quad down by damaging the props....   Never mind consequential damage and polluting the environment with plastic BB's.  %-B

[Barny]

I have some multicopter an none of them sounds similar.
Depending of size, payload, used hardware and the style of flight you'll get a complete different frequency spectrum.
To detect all sorts of multicopter and copters is not that easy.

Imagine your neighbor bought one, while you play a "recorded" sound of a true drone, should be fun eh ? 

It's much easier.

Wait till bees, wasps or bumble-bees flies arround and this thing will freak out.

[kfitch42]

Did they photoshop the matlab spectrum graph?!?! Notice how nicely 'stacked' the data is. I really doubt the electric leaf blower is louder than the gas leaf blower. Also, the RC copter spectrum cuts out at the peak of the quadcopter spectrum.

[thefatmoop]

Oh yeah that's photoshopped. There will be huge spike in the higher frequency due to the ESC pwm freq. Overall the project makes sense, but you're not going to really get an advanced warning. Copter flies within a 100ft of you and your alarm starts going off... well of course you're going to know that there's a 'drone' nearby.

[thefatmoop]

I don't get why you'd want to detect Xbee?

Most of the drones that cause concern are the larger ones that people build to carry dslr cameras and whatnot. Xbees are popular to use as modems since they are super simple and can have huge range.