The hope of tacos being delivered to San Francisco Bay area residents, as advertised on a web site listing itself as a \u201cprivate beta\u201d link was busted as a hoax by Christina Bonnington of Wired<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 She wrote that TacoCopter was the brainchild of, \u201cStar Simpson, an MIT grad who stumbled into the limelight in 2007 after being\u00a0arrested for wearing a hoax explosive device<\/a>\u00a0comprised of a circuit board and green LEDs.\u201d\u00a0 This was after 14,000 \u201clikes\u201d on Wired<\/em>\u2019s Facebook page and 4,000 tweets excited about the possibility of tacos from the sky.\u00a0 But who knows?\u00a0 The Huffington Post<\/em> said it was the real deal and concluded its article by urging, \u201cLet’s do this, America: Together, we can team up and make a future with Tacocopters<\/a> a reality today.\u201d\u00a0 This seems to have an aspect of clapping our hands to make Tinkerbelle fly, but is worth the wishing for.<\/p>\n Perhaps as a response to the uproar over aerial tacos, a free-spirited trio from Yelp put together a fixed-wing alternative, the Burrito Bomber<\/a>, a flying wing, electrically-powered delivery vehicle, unlikely to miss its promised ETA unless there\u2019s a back-up in the kitchen.\u00a0 Their Devo-like video and costuming betray a Yelp corporate culture that\u2019s a bit more fun than the last few bouts of involuntary servitude your editor endured.<\/p>\n A great deal of the bomber is off-the-hobby-shop-shelf equipment.\u00a0 A Skywalker X-8 FPV\/UAV Flying Wing powered by a small outrunner motor provides the heft: a Quantum RTR Bomb System provides the means of precision air drops.\u00a0 The team added a three-inch diameter mailing tube to hold the gastronomical deliverable. The full bill of materials<\/a> gives sources, a great deal from DIY Drones<\/em><\/a>, for this economical and potentially profitable delivery system.\u00a0 All is amazingly inexpensive, including autopilots below $60.<\/p>\n Logistics teams at the taqueria can set navigation waypoints and load those into an ArduPilot control system, which allows the Bomber to find its way, theoretically, through wind, rain, snow or dark of night. Control freaks can manually control the aircraft by following its progress through a video feed from a built-in camera.<\/p>\n Darwin Aerospace describes a typical mission.\u00a0 \u201cOrders are taken through a web app, which pinpoints a user’s location and automatically creates a waypoint file for the drone to follow. Then an operator loads the burrito into the canister, uploads the waypoint file, and sends the bomber on its way. The canister holds and protects a 500 gram burrito and deploys an attached parachute when dropped, so the contents arrive in one edible piece at their destination.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/cafe.foundation\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/tacocopter.jpg\" "\\"tacocopter\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\n