FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Here's Another Way to Get Rid of Your Neighbor's Dumb Drone

It doesn’t make the pew pew sound though. You lose some.

Drones. They're buzzy, getting faster, more commercial, they can knock you out cold or dead, and they're up in your grill. There's no place to hide. This thing of Orwellian nightmares is… going to get shot down by lasers.

You can thank Boeing for that: the aerospace company developed a 2 kilowatt infrared laser—the invisible, silent kind, not the Star Wars pew-pew-y kind—for the sole purpose of burning holes into drones and bringing them down. WIRED describes the device describes the device as a sort of overgrown camera that can swivel on a tripod that capable of burning through a drone shell in mere seconds and can be packed in four suitcases.

The targeting system uses a laptop and an Xbox controller to work, and it can automate targeting once in range. It's also precise enough to knock out any drone part you want rather than take down the whole thing. The demonstration WIRED saw was able to burn off the shell within two seconds. High tech skeet shooting, anyone?

It's a nifty, compact solution for anti-drone warfare, but it's got a ways to go before it replaces traditional means of taking down drones. Just make sure you don't take down someone else's in America: that's illegal.