Micro Mosquito RC helicopter is a flying lithium ion battery

In a conversation recently with Boston Power’s Christina Lampe-Onerud, she talked about the changes we could expect to see in electronics as lithium ion batteries improve in terms of life cycles as well as energy density. This weekend at Maker Faire I came across an example from the world of toys: The indoor Micro Mosquito RC helicopter being demo’d at the Radio Shack booth.

As you can see (kind of) from the picture, the Mosquito is a small dual-rotor helicopter that pretty much fits in your hand, and everything that isn’t a rotor or the cosmetic head is the rechargeable lithium polymer battery. It flies for a long time on a single charge and recharges pretty quickly. Radio Shack also had an ornithopter that flew quite well in the cavernous hall. From a quick search on the web it looks like the Mosquito first became available about 18 months ago and may have been through a design iteration. (Radio Shack is the distributor for the original designer, Interactive Toy Concepts.) This one flew great. A couple of years ago you couldn’t find such toys at any virtually any price, and now they sell for $70.