Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from house Stuff Works dot com.
Speaker 1: We're smart Happens Hi. I'm are so branding with today's question,
Speaker 1: what is the difference between a good toy helicopter and
Speaker 1: a bad toy helicopter? And the reason why this question
Speaker 1: came up is because my kids, the twins, got little
Speaker 1: indoor helicopters for Christmas. And these things they're the kind
Speaker 1: of thing you would get at the mall uh and
Speaker 1: they were given to them by my mother. And these
Speaker 1: were fantastic toys in the sense that the twins love them.
Speaker 1: They played with them all day Christmas Day. But even
Speaker 1: though they were radio controlled, or really not really radio controlled,
Speaker 1: but in this case they were infrared controlled helicopters, so
Speaker 1: you were supposed to be able to steer them with
Speaker 1: a little control box, you could not actually steer them
Speaker 1: very well. And that meant that they crashed into walls
Speaker 1: and lamps and just about any obstacle there was in
Speaker 1: the house. And by the end of Christmas Day these
Speaker 1: things could no longer fly. They had been beat up
Speaker 1: so badly from running into things that they couldn't get
Speaker 1: off the ground anymore. So now the twins had these
Speaker 1: toys that they loved, but that no longer worked, and I,
Speaker 1: as their parents, set out to figure out is there
Speaker 1: such a thing as a toy helicopter in the thirty
Speaker 1: ish dollar range that's actually a good toy that you
Speaker 1: actually can control accurately, fly around accurately, and avoid running
Speaker 1: into things so it lasts more than eight hours. To
Speaker 1: make a long story short, the answer is that, yes,
Speaker 1: there is such a thing as an indoor helicopter in
Speaker 1: the thirty dollar range that little kids can control successfully
Speaker 1: and that will last for weeks or months at a time.
Speaker 1: And I've found out about this both by reading on
Speaker 1: the internet and by talking to friends. It turns out
Speaker 1: the model number is the S one oh seven G,
Speaker 1: which you can find all over the internet for as
Speaker 1: little as twenty two dollars online. Usually it's more like
Speaker 1: thirty or forty dollars if you find it in a store.
Speaker 1: But the thing that makes these machines so amazing is
Speaker 1: that they're incredibly stable in flight, and they have very
Speaker 1: very precise steering. The twins can fly them without crashing
Speaker 1: them at all, and they're better constructed. They have metal
Speaker 1: bodies and metal parts in all the places that are
Speaker 1: likely to fail so there have been no issues with
Speaker 1: the Twins flying these things around. It's a good lesson
Speaker 1: in how product A and product be, even though they
Speaker 1: do the same kind of thing in the same kind
Speaker 1: of price range, can perform completely differently. In this case,
Speaker 1: the S one oh seven is an order of magnitude
Speaker 1: better than the little helicopters that they replaced, So what's
Speaker 1: the difference, Like, how can this thing be so much better?
Speaker 1: And then one of the key differences is the fact
Speaker 1: that there's a little accelerometer built into the helicopter and
Speaker 1: a little computer that can listen to that accelerometer and
Speaker 1: make it more stable in the air. The other thing
Speaker 1: is that the S one oh seven has a tail rotor,
Speaker 1: where the ones that the Twins originally got did not.
Speaker 1: And this tail rotor is interesting because it's not oriented
Speaker 1: vertically like a normal helicopter. It's oriented horizontally. So these
Speaker 1: are twin rotor helicopters with counter rotating blades. The rotation
Speaker 1: of the blades cancel each other out, so technically you
Speaker 1: don't need a tail rotor to keep the body from spinning.
Speaker 1: But what the horizontal tail rotor does is it lets
Speaker 1: you tip the helicopter forward or backward while it's in flight,
Speaker 1: and that gives you a way to point it in
Speaker 1: a direction to start going in that direction at a
Speaker 1: good rate of speed, and then on the control stick
Speaker 1: you have the ability to rotate the helicopter body in
Speaker 1: mid air and control which direction you want to go.
Speaker 1: This is nothing like the way real helicopters work that
Speaker 1: we see flying around covering news stories and things like that,
Speaker 1: but it's a very very stable way to have a
Speaker 1: toy helicopter that works really well. Here's another interesting thing
Speaker 1: about these toy helicopters that the Twins got, either the
Speaker 1: original ones they got or the ones that are much
Speaker 1: more stable, these toys would have been absolutely impossible for
Speaker 1: anyone to create when I was a kid, and there
Speaker 1: are at least five reasons why that's so. The first
Speaker 1: reason is because the motors in these helicopters. Each helicopter
Speaker 1: has three motors to that control the two main rotors
Speaker 1: and one that controls the tail rotor. Those motors can
Speaker 1: be so small and so powerful because of the invention
Speaker 1: of neo dimium magnets. These magnets had not been invented
Speaker 1: when I was a kid. The second reason is because
Speaker 1: the battery can be so small and light because it
Speaker 1: uses lithium polymer technology, and that didn't exist when I
Speaker 1: was a kid. The third reason is because the stability
Speaker 1: and flight is made possible by this clever counter rotating
Speaker 1: rotor design with a weighted balancing bar that automatically stabilizes
Speaker 1: the helicopter anytime it tries to tip in one direction
Speaker 1: or the other. That design was invented and patented fairly recently. Then,
Speaker 1: the fourth reason is that the stability is enhanced by
Speaker 1: these little inexpensive onboard accelerometer chips and a little microprocessor,
Speaker 1: and neither of those things existed when I was a kid,
Speaker 1: especially in a tiny form factor like that that could
Speaker 1: have been battery operated. And then, fifth and finally, the
Speaker 1: control for this thing is provided by infrared l e
Speaker 1: ed s and a tiny Infra A receiver inside the helicopter.
Speaker 1: The l E d s didn't exist when I was
Speaker 1: a kid, and the cost of both the sender and
Speaker 1: the receiver technology has been driven to near zero because
Speaker 1: it's the same technology used in almost every TV remote control.
Speaker 1: So they've been manufacturing these remote controls in such gigantic
Speaker 1: volumes that the costs have been reduced to practically zero.
Speaker 1: That is a whole lot of new technology coming together
Speaker 1: to make toy helicopters possible in the price range. Who
Speaker 1: knows what toy helicopters will look like in twenty years.
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