A batteryless drone swings on its cable over two rooms in Basel

A drone with no battery hangs from its own power cable in Basel. Martin Fuchs built it for the Live Video Fest, which ran 24 to 26 September across CollectiveMedia's two rooms. The F450 frame lost its battery and gained a continuous feed from the wall. Its camera signal travels by cable, not radio.

Visitors start the flight. A push of a button in the exhibition kiosk tells the drone to take off, run its programmed route, and land again on its own. The control path is a small Arduino Nano ESP32 on the airframe, sending PPM pulses to a DJI remote controller that thinks it hears a human thumb. Everything is homemade, and most of it is borrowed parts with different jobs.

The interesting part is what the drone sees. Its live feed goes to six screens in one room and to a single projection in the other, so two audiences watch the same flight at once. One image splits into fragments around the walls. The other stays whole. Two ways of watching a machine look at a room from above.

The festival connected two venues, the exhibition window on Gärtnerstrasse and the grounds, and either could trigger a launch. The video chain is a cable journey: S-Video out of the camera, converted to HDMI, split across the screens, then through a USB webcam into OBS Studio and out again as a livestream. A battery removed, a picture shared. That is the whole trick.

Tethered flight is older than batteries. This drone is a kite with better manners. Fuchs documents the build on his site, wiring and code included, which is the part most installations keep private.

Project page: https://martinfu.ch/s/#2026_drohne

■ Filed from Aeray: the Birds, Air wing of the city.