Canadian Engineer Builds a Drone-Powered Umbrella That Follows You in the Rain: It Actually Keeps You Dry

With over five years in the web and tech space, I've developed a deep passion for PC hardware and peripherals. I'm a habitual researcher, always eager to learn more, which has expanded my knowledge beyond PCs and keyboards to include TVs, headphones, and even vacuum cleaners. With over five years in the web and tech space, I've developed a deep passion for PC hardware and peripherals. I'm a habitual researcher, always eager to learn more, which has expanded my knowledge beyond PCs and keyboards to include TVs, headphones, and even vacuum cleaners. It is downpouring. Your hands are full — phone out, bag over one shoulder, coffee somehow still in hand. Above your head, a cheerful yellow umbrella hovers with the quiet confidence of a well-trained drone, because that's exactly what it is: a quadcopter running computer vision on a Raspberry Pi. Canadian engineer John Tse, of the YouTube channel I Build Stuff, built it not for your commute, but because the engineering challenge was there and he had the tools to meet it. It works. You cannot buy it. How a $10 Problem Gets Solved With $1,000 of Robotics The build is genuinely clever — a quadcopter disguised so well it takes a second look to spot the propellers. Standard yellow umbrella canopy on top. Underneath: four drone motors mounted on custom 3D-printed folding arms made from carbon-fiber nylon — lightweight, rigid, and foldable for transport. A time-of-flight depth camera, which fires light pulses and measures the return time to build a live 3D map of the scene, tracks your head position continuously. A Raspberry Pi processes that data and commands the flight controller to keep the canopy centered above you as you move. No GPS — consumer-grade positioning is far too coarse for hovering precisely above a moving person's head. What Tse built in 2026 is actually Flying Umbrella 2.0. The 2024 version required manual piloting. This one just follows you. A few hard numbers worth knowing: Battery life runs 10–15 minutes per charge per charge Performs in rain and low light; strong wind causes real problems Exposed spinning propellers hover near your head — an obvious safety concern in any crowd Not for sale, no launch plan, no confirmed price Roughly one to two years of iteration, including miswired motors and computing failures along the way Solving a problem that a rain jacket handles for well under $30 with a sophisticated drone tracking system is objectively absurd. That's also precisely the point. If you're curious about smart gadgets that take a more practical approach, the contrast couldn't be sharper. Why This Won't Show Up on Your Doorstep The gap between 'works in a parking lot' and 'ships to consumers' is wider than the drone flies. Most jurisdictions heavily restrict autonomous drones operating near people in public spaces — under current aviation codes in the EU, UK, and US, flying a self-guided drone at head height around bystanders is a regulatory obstacle course. Battery life would need to at least double before any real-world use case makes sense. Spinning propellers near bystanders create serious safety and liability concerns. And Tse has announced no retail path, no pre-order, nothing. A rain jacket solves the same problem for a fraction of the effort. That's not the point either. What Tse actually built is a proof of concept for a category that doesn't exist yet — autonomous personal accessories. Cheap sensors, maker-grade computing, and off-the-shelf drone hardware are now powerful enough that one engineer, working alone, can produce something that looked purely like science fiction just a couple of years ago. The flying umbrella isn't a product. It's a dispatch from the near future, filed early.