Lightscribe -- writing with light -- An idea of our trainees could be realized in a few days -- or better to say -- nights. We exported text and graphics as vectors and computed optimized route plans for our Microdrone MD4 UAV. The projective camera model was considered in the route planning, thus the UAV was flying always at the same altitude but the result exposed to the spectators at the computed position on the ground was upright and almost free of distortions. For drawing on the sky we replaced the camera module by a custom ciruit powering two 3.5 Watts LED lamps combined with an alloy reflector to make the light even visible on sunny days.

For saving the idea's output we did long time exposures over the whole flight, for more than six minutes, which results in gorgeous pictures.

More pictures can be found in the cDrones gallery: http://goo.gl/qstZX