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