Note to anyone unafamiliar: There is a thriving "FPV" ecosystem of drones that can be DIYed. Example common setup, you can mix+match:
- Small square PCB with the main flight control MCU (STM32), and some sensors
- Smalls square PCB with motor drivers
- Carbon fiber frame
- Small PCB with a LoRa radio
- Camera and video transmission system. (90s-security-cam style analog, or digital.
- Brushless DC motors, props etc
Uses Betaflight, ArduPilot, iNav, or PX4 firmware. Or, you could write your own.
The PCB-frame in the article is neat and has obvious convenience advantages, but I speculate that it would not be stiff enough for desirable controllable characteristics under high accel situations.
5+ years ago the vast majority of this stuff was proprietary-only and getting into the hobby cost thousands of dollars. Now you could start at ~$500 (big price factor for FPV is the goggles, but cheap analog ones can be had for ~$100).
With luck the OpenIPC cameras that are starting to come on the market will find traction and the entire hardware stack will run on open source firmware.
This is all true, but just to set expectations: the open source ecosystem seems to be lagging the proprietary world pretty significantly, unless there's some corner where development is really chugging along that's not making it out to the rest of the hobbyist market.
Though there have been incremental improvements in flight control software, and video subsystems have moved (mostly) from analog to 2.4/5.8 GHz and digital, the overall architecture is pretty similar to what it was 5+ years ago. You have a hobby R/C transmitter and receiver driving PWM outputs (through the flight controller, typically an STM32) to hobby-type ESCs which control the motors. The ESCs are microcontroller-driven and can be reflashed, but painstakingly and annoyingly. Telemetry is typically separate from control, which is separate from video. Everything is very short-range and non-IP.
In comparison, a COTS quadcopter from DJI has a single backhaul from the airframe to the controller which does control, video, and and telemetry. And the video is impressively low-latency. (I'm pretty sure they use a WiFi-type chipset and just spew raw vendor frames, and the receiver picks up what it can, best effort. You could do this with an ESP32 in ESP-NOW mode, I suspect?) I've seen some efforts to reverse-engineer the DJI protocol but I'm not aware of a fully compatible implementation or equivalent in the OSS world.
And at the upper end of the commercial/proprietary space you have systems with out-of-the-box autonomy, multiple backhauls over IP -- so they can use LOS/BLOS radio, LTE, SATCOM, whatever you want -- integration with navigation beacon systems to reduce GPS dependence, hybrid motor/generators, redundant power systems, the whole shebang.
There's no real reason aside from developer interest that this situation exists, as far as I can see. The components are mostly all available. A Raspberry Pi running a decent RTOS would have orders of magnitude more processing capacity than an STM32 and could easily do the sort of multi-sensor fusion that the commercial systems do. LTE modems are cheap. A bigger hexacopter or fixed-wing could easily loft one of the small Starlink dishes, if someone wanted to. Stuff like "perching" (landing and recharging from solar panels) is entirely possible.
But from what I can tell, the cutting edge of open source drones is happening behind closed doors in Ukraine and Iran.
Happy to be corrected if there's new stuff that I'm not tracking, but the gap between the "art of the possible" and current practice seems large.
Lots of opportunity though, is the other way to view it.
Everything here is possible, the gap in implementation is that it’s a) expensive and b) non trivial engineering work. There is vanishingly small overlap between the people whom have the capital for parts, the understanding of the engineering needed, free time to do it and desire to do it for free.
The people whom have the true multidisciplinary understanding to do robotics well can usually also consult (with little difficulty finding work) for $$$s per hour and get the same “problem solving satisfaction”.
Open source software shortcuts a couple of these limitations because you can work on it with little investment over than time.
That is consistent with my experience. My highlights:
- Current betaflight devevelopers and leaders are incompetent (They inherited the code base from others), and are slow, and varying degrees of willing, to add higher-level flight-control mechanics (semi-autonomous modes etc).
- The Ardupilot and PX4 configuration systems, and general experience, are user-hostile.
Note that the converses of these hold: Betaflight has a reasonably-good user experience, and Ardupilot and PX4 have extensive higher-level flight control mechanics. If only you could get the pros of both together!
Regarding hardware, frames generally accommodate flight controllers and ESCs elegantly, but other hardware like cameras, radios, and especially batteries, feel clumsy to assemble in a safe and consistent way.
> All-in-one PCB: Doesn’t need any 3D printed parts or such
I actually am fine 3D printing and laser cutting stuff at home but I don't have the stuff to make a PCB and don't have the hand skills to do anything more than through-hole soldering.
> There is a thriving "FPV" ecosystem of drones that can be DIYed.
As someone who has for decades built flying things which could be drone'ified any day of the week, it is sort of also necessary to point out that even before drones became so widespread and commonplace, rcgroups.com has been the ecosystem in which to find oneself.
And indeed, the "model airplane/remote control flight" subject has been prosperous and flourishing as a hobby for decades too .. just feast yourself on the categories here:
A very earnest exploration of the various sub-forums will reveal some extraordinary designs - some which, indeed, break the 'norm' for what a flying thing should look like, in respect to a more casual view. Magnus, aerostat, Fettler are pretty good search terms...
Fun. I'm looking into turning my old iPhone into a drone as it has great hardware already to do higher level tasks and use ESP32 for the more real time stuff like actually driving the motors based on sensor input.
If you think about it, an old iPhone 6 comes with GPS, gyro, accelerometer, multiple cameras, pretty powerful processors, bluetooth + wifi + LTE, sound + light, ambient + proximity sensors. Get rid of the case, and you have a great mini computer that can be aware of its surroundings and communicate.
On more modern iPhones, you can even use advanced tech like ARKit to have great spatial understanding of your drone and environment and do autonomous drones. With an iPhone 15, you can even get spatial video. How amazing would that be?
I wish Apple provided a straightforward way to unlock(like remove restrictions on the OS level) old phones and use them for DIY projects.
I got an ESP32 WROOM 32U board that I intent to use it as the flight controller which will keep the drone within its flight envelope and do the maneuvering upon receiving commands from the phone.
I find the phone appealing because I want try to make it somewhat autonomous, like im RTS games where you give a unit a command to go somewhere and it figures the path out by itself and avoids obstacles without direct input. The phone has quite a lot of processing power and sensors and IMHO doing it on board will be more interesting. Also, I'm not sure that the connection will be always stable and high bitrate make the drone a thin client.
True but, IMHO, a lot of the higher level task should be able to handle it. I guess you can have a simple real time IC to handle the flight envelope to provide stable flight and then use the iPhone to do the advanced operations. For example, if you are building a drone that is mapping the environment and follows you through a bike ride, does it really matter if the 3D environment it creates for autonomous navigation is slightly off? You can continuously compensate for it, stick with moving averages and avoid extreme moves.
That real-time controller still needs the IMU sensors, which is maybe what GP was responding to. (Your iPhone could have an additional set of them, but the ones on the phone don't do any good to the real-time subsystem.)
Oh, I got an accelerometer card for that. It's very small and cheap, there are also cards that contain a gyro + barometer. So if the phone ones are not real-time enough cheap options exist.
Hence a microcontroller for flight control. The iPhone can just decide on the higher level tasks and send control signals to the microcontroller, similar to how a microcontroller delegates tasks to the underlying hardware peripherals.
Fun! I built a Crazyflie[1] back in the day which was bespoke 2.4GHz protocols (no ESP32 at the time) so this is a great upgrade to that. Also the use of a single low side MOSFET as the motor controller makes it simpler and cheaper at the expense of some moves that BLDC motors give you. All in all, at $10 - $15 that is a great deal and I'm wondering if one will show up in a Hackerbox[2] as that is exactly the kind of thing they do.
I have had a lot of fun playing with the CF microdrones, I'm definitely going to build one of these too.
What a great time for this article! The US is having a mass hysteria event and it turns out you can churn out DYI drones for the fat sum of $12-13 each? What a time to be alive!
Edit:
Hmm, considering that people are taking stars for UFOs lately, maybe a cheap drone is an overkill and a 20-pack of Chinese sky lanterns would be more than enough to keep the average US neighbourhood in a state of constant fear / see how long it takes for you to get to the front page of /r/UFOs...
Judging from the posts I’ve seen, others have already started. Someone had a drone with a lit Roman candle going the other day. Or it was FAA compliant aliens. One of the two.
Welcome to hacker News! Yes, we find ignorance funny. I think people adding fuel to the fire are the ones freaking out about aliens or Iranian mother ships. Pointing out that the this is a hysteria event is more akin to pouring water on the flames.
No, it is not "Hacker News" to paint a large swath of people as "ignorant". The proper way would have been to publish a detailed, technical analysis and present your ideas along with your proof to the greater community and facilitate a discussion.
I want to live in this world, where we're all part of a larger collective endeavor to discover the truth, to be more informed, learn continuously, and evolve together. That's the old-school philosophy and mission of science for the betterment of humanity.
My guy, there are government officials that are sharing photos of the Orion constellation stating that it's a drone swarm just standing there over their property...
The interesting/scary part is that its not that hard to weaponise these drones. You can make one drop a home made explosive pretty easily, fully autonomous. and then dump itself into a body of water. All for way less cost than a gun.
I don’t know what drone you’re talking about but you absolutely cannot make a tiny Wi-Fi drone autonomous or drop things for less than a cost of a gun, every part of your statement is wrong. Currently anyone smart enough to build drone with 7 inch propellers and programmable GPS waypoints, improvised explosives … 3d printed release mechanism .. probably has a pretty good paying job and doesn’t see the value proposition of blowing things up
You know what you can easily do drive a truck into a crowd of people or fill your car with explosives in park it under a building and then blow up the entire building, but people aren’t doing that every day but continue whingeing about drones
Autonomous isn’t a problem, the open source firmwares for drones include fully autonomous mode. I don’t know if this particular one does but it should be easy to port. The size and range, however, doesn’t make this particular drone very scary.
I find it funny that the US is so obsessed with infantry firearms and surgical strikes that people think those are the best "ways to go" for certain things. I guess not a bad thing considering we don't need any improved means for those stuffs...
It's not scary when it is just a hypothetical. If this were happening with some frequency it would be concerning. Until then I suspect there is something you are overlooking, oversimplifying.
(EDIT: I'm assuming you are talking about non-military use.)
With this a lot of damage can be done even without drone. As for weaponized it's not a future, it's a reality in Ukraine for years now. Defense against them is difficult to impossible. A bodyguard who can sacrifice himself may sometimes work.
This is amazing. Even the landing gear (struts?) is part of the PCB. I hope the author considers selling kits or outsourcing kits to SeedStudio. I live in a country where digikey order shipping is quite pricey.
The author estimates the BOM to be a little under US$13. At that price it would be fun to try create a swarm for DIY drone lights show.
FWIW, making just 10 might drive that $13 price down quite a bit.
Although, it looks like 1 unit might be closer to $50 (at least for the suppliers I might use), but $150 for 10.
I think costs could be cut somewhat though. The USB->serial chip is nearly $6, but differently packaged it can be $4.40 for 1 or $3.99/ea for 10, and alternative chips that seem like they should be good enough can be cheaper still. The voltage regulator they chose is $1/ea for 500ma, while the one I would normally go to is $0.22/ea for 1000ma (dropping down to $0.13/ea for 10).
Does it need a regulator at all? ESP32 should be able to run on raw battery voltage, assuming the ESP is necessary. RealTek TX2/RX2 + PIC10/ATTiny10/CH32V003 could be even cheaper if user is okay with a dedicated transmitter.
To answer the question asked by the [dead] commenter: because every other electronic component distributor site (with the exception of Mouser, which is basically DigiKey with a different stylesheet) is much worse.
this is amazing. on similar note, I have spent last few months trying to fit visual inertial odometry into esp32. Combining that with this would be insane (and so cheap!)
I played with €25 foldable wifi drone from Lidl until EU started requiring €30 fee annual for a camera drone.
I cannot think much practical use for drone without a camera. Fly-fishing might be one, but I need to program it so that it drops the line and returns home the moment it feels fish yanking.
Is this just someone reposting espressif's esp-drone (https://github.com/espressif/esp-drone) and passing it off as their own (and DigiKey posting it on their site)? They talk about making a custom PCB, but it looks pretty much the same.
The repository linked from the article (https://github.com/Circuit-Digest/ESP-Drone) has some issues claiming there's malware in it, and the commit history looks a little suspicious, but I could be wrong.
Since those who filed the issue did not even stated which file is affected this is pure speculation but the virus issue really look like a false positive. The pre-built firmware checked into a repo could easily trigger an anti-virus.
The repo is mostly made of plain text files, the zip and the bin don't look required for anything so if your feeling paranoid delete them before building!
love everything here but I'm skeptical of real time control via wifi. for me there's always been a noticeable delay in video streaming and receiving control signal so I'm curious how this works?
I just saw the two comments in question and find it to be absolutely hilarious.
A serious answer to your question - no, these are in the "whoop" weight-class. Warhead carrying drones for anti-personnel and anti-armor are usually 10 inch and up, meaning they are using "10 inch" frames and likely 3115 motors, with 6S battery packs. Of course, there's endless variation, but that seems to be a optimum combination
Whoops and 7" drones are pretty far apart (depending on what you consider "far", I guess). Whoops can barely lift their own weight, 7" drones can carry maybe a kilo.
Yup. About fifteen years ago there was an explosion in small-run PCB services that cater to hobbyists (and cottage-scale professionals). If you don't need them overnight you can get good quality PCBs made at a very reasonable price.
Even if they have components on them, that's only $1-$2 extra per board (depending on the components), JLCPCB will assemble all the common components (resistors, capacitors, some more exotic ones) for very cheap, and you can solder the rest yourself. Their PCB assembly saves so much time, I don't want to waste half an hour soldering 20 0805 resistors to save $0.30 any more.
JLCPCB assembly services are so cheap as long as you don't use components marked as extended!
I don't solder passive components anymore and now mostly use 0402 (that i am not able to solder reliably) instead of the bigger 0805. If you value your time and don't derive pleasure from soldering passive components, try the assembly services!
Feels like a poor fit, given the limited number of cores available.
Would be awesome to see rp2350 or some such, where there are very low power io cores available that can do work whether the main core is on or not. Embedded really is one of the best places for many-core, but it's so so rare there are good offload architectures and puny Programmable IO systems.
Should out to folks like Silego/Dialog/Renesas with their GreenPAK; ultra tiny but interesting mixed signal little bits of programmable logic with a healthy dollop of peripherals!
Calling the RP2350's PIO units "low power io cores" is quite an exaggeration. Although they are technically turing-complete with a lot of hacking, they are absolutely awful at any kind of compute. Heck, you probably don't even want to let it handle UART parity calculation!
If anything the ESP32's Ultra-Low-Power Coprocessor would be perfect for such applications - but realistically it isn't worth the effort. Compute power usage is going to be negligible compared to what is needed for wifi and rotors, and running multiple realtime tasks on a single core isn't exactly rocket science either.
Meta: This has to be one of the most aggressively blocked pages I've encountered as it refuses to render any content if you have an adblocker on (uBlock at least) and resists several forms of archiving.
I'm also using firefox/ublock but I'm getting the mentioned agressively-blocked page. I'm also using a VPN, if that makes any difference.
I also see the extremely light "Press & Hold" message to prove I am not a bot. I missed it the first few times I loaded the page because my eyes just don't pick up on things like that very easily (I'm the guy who turns the brightness up in video games with a lot of shadow). Not only does this press & hold action seem to be ineffective, but they made a message that some humans have trouble seem to keep bots out? Smdh.
Which is disappointing, because I've ordered from digikey countless times, both for work and for personal projects. There should be absolutely no reason they clamp down on people using adblockers since they are highly profitable already. Guess I'll be looking for a different parts source.
uBlock on, pihole on the net - not sure what it dislikes more.
I see a screen (light grey on white) which reads something along to "Press & hold" some button to confirm i'm human. Which does nothing, because of adblocking?
Well, f* you then - let me find something different to read :)
Note to anyone unafamiliar: There is a thriving "FPV" ecosystem of drones that can be DIYed. Example common setup, you can mix+match:
Uses Betaflight, ArduPilot, iNav, or PX4 firmware. Or, you could write your own.The PCB-frame in the article is neat and has obvious convenience advantages, but I speculate that it would not be stiff enough for desirable controllable characteristics under high accel situations.
And a lot of it is all open source!
ESC software:
- https://github.com/am32-firmware
- https://github.com/mathiasvr/bluejay
Flight controller (you mentioned these):
- https://github.com/betaflight
- https://github.com/ArduPilot
- https://github.com/iNavFlight
Control link:
- https://github.com/ExpressLRS (also uses ESP32/ESP82 chips)
Radio Controllers:
- https://github.com/EdgeTX
5+ years ago the vast majority of this stuff was proprietary-only and getting into the hobby cost thousands of dollars. Now you could start at ~$500 (big price factor for FPV is the goggles, but cheap analog ones can be had for ~$100).
With luck the OpenIPC cameras that are starting to come on the market will find traction and the entire hardware stack will run on open source firmware.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdjI3ZQsmCA
This is so cool; LFTI!
This is all true, but just to set expectations: the open source ecosystem seems to be lagging the proprietary world pretty significantly, unless there's some corner where development is really chugging along that's not making it out to the rest of the hobbyist market.
Though there have been incremental improvements in flight control software, and video subsystems have moved (mostly) from analog to 2.4/5.8 GHz and digital, the overall architecture is pretty similar to what it was 5+ years ago. You have a hobby R/C transmitter and receiver driving PWM outputs (through the flight controller, typically an STM32) to hobby-type ESCs which control the motors. The ESCs are microcontroller-driven and can be reflashed, but painstakingly and annoyingly. Telemetry is typically separate from control, which is separate from video. Everything is very short-range and non-IP.
In comparison, a COTS quadcopter from DJI has a single backhaul from the airframe to the controller which does control, video, and and telemetry. And the video is impressively low-latency. (I'm pretty sure they use a WiFi-type chipset and just spew raw vendor frames, and the receiver picks up what it can, best effort. You could do this with an ESP32 in ESP-NOW mode, I suspect?) I've seen some efforts to reverse-engineer the DJI protocol but I'm not aware of a fully compatible implementation or equivalent in the OSS world.
And at the upper end of the commercial/proprietary space you have systems with out-of-the-box autonomy, multiple backhauls over IP -- so they can use LOS/BLOS radio, LTE, SATCOM, whatever you want -- integration with navigation beacon systems to reduce GPS dependence, hybrid motor/generators, redundant power systems, the whole shebang.
There's no real reason aside from developer interest that this situation exists, as far as I can see. The components are mostly all available. A Raspberry Pi running a decent RTOS would have orders of magnitude more processing capacity than an STM32 and could easily do the sort of multi-sensor fusion that the commercial systems do. LTE modems are cheap. A bigger hexacopter or fixed-wing could easily loft one of the small Starlink dishes, if someone wanted to. Stuff like "perching" (landing and recharging from solar panels) is entirely possible.
But from what I can tell, the cutting edge of open source drones is happening behind closed doors in Ukraine and Iran.
Happy to be corrected if there's new stuff that I'm not tracking, but the gap between the "art of the possible" and current practice seems large.
Lots of opportunity though, is the other way to view it.
Everything here is possible, the gap in implementation is that it’s a) expensive and b) non trivial engineering work. There is vanishingly small overlap between the people whom have the capital for parts, the understanding of the engineering needed, free time to do it and desire to do it for free.
The people whom have the true multidisciplinary understanding to do robotics well can usually also consult (with little difficulty finding work) for $$$s per hour and get the same “problem solving satisfaction”.
Open source software shortcuts a couple of these limitations because you can work on it with little investment over than time.
That is consistent with my experience. My highlights:
- Current betaflight devevelopers and leaders are incompetent (They inherited the code base from others), and are slow, and varying degrees of willing, to add higher-level flight-control mechanics (semi-autonomous modes etc).
- The Ardupilot and PX4 configuration systems, and general experience, are user-hostile.
Note that the converses of these hold: Betaflight has a reasonably-good user experience, and Ardupilot and PX4 have extensive higher-level flight control mechanics. If only you could get the pros of both together!
Regarding hardware, frames generally accommodate flight controllers and ESCs elegantly, but other hardware like cameras, radios, and especially batteries, feel clumsy to assemble in a safe and consistent way.
Fwiw, betaflight for acro flight is probably the best. Tuning is dead simple. Filtering is possibly the best.
That said, I don’t need much else because I just fly acro mode 100% of the time.
Also
> All-in-one PCB: Doesn’t need any 3D printed parts or such
I actually am fine 3D printing and laser cutting stuff at home but I don't have the stuff to make a PCB and don't have the hand skills to do anything more than through-hole soldering.
> There is a thriving "FPV" ecosystem of drones that can be DIYed.
As someone who has for decades built flying things which could be drone'ified any day of the week, it is sort of also necessary to point out that even before drones became so widespread and commonplace, rcgroups.com has been the ecosystem in which to find oneself.
And indeed, the "model airplane/remote control flight" subject has been prosperous and flourishing as a hobby for decades too .. just feast yourself on the categories here:
https://www.rcgroups.com/forums/index.php
A very earnest exploration of the various sub-forums will reveal some extraordinary designs - some which, indeed, break the 'norm' for what a flying thing should look like, in respect to a more casual view. Magnus, aerostat, Fettler are pretty good search terms...
Fun. I'm looking into turning my old iPhone into a drone as it has great hardware already to do higher level tasks and use ESP32 for the more real time stuff like actually driving the motors based on sensor input.
If you think about it, an old iPhone 6 comes with GPS, gyro, accelerometer, multiple cameras, pretty powerful processors, bluetooth + wifi + LTE, sound + light, ambient + proximity sensors. Get rid of the case, and you have a great mini computer that can be aware of its surroundings and communicate.
On more modern iPhones, you can even use advanced tech like ARKit to have great spatial understanding of your drone and environment and do autonomous drones. With an iPhone 15, you can even get spatial video. How amazing would that be?
I wish Apple provided a straightforward way to unlock(like remove restrictions on the OS level) old phones and use them for DIY projects.
Do you really need the phone? The dual core 240MHz ESP32 seems to be able to do the job at lower weight and power consumption.
Maybe the old phone is better used as a controller?
I got an ESP32 WROOM 32U board that I intent to use it as the flight controller which will keep the drone within its flight envelope and do the maneuvering upon receiving commands from the phone.
I find the phone appealing because I want try to make it somewhat autonomous, like im RTS games where you give a unit a command to go somewhere and it figures the path out by itself and avoids obstacles without direct input. The phone has quite a lot of processing power and sensors and IMHO doing it on board will be more interesting. Also, I'm not sure that the connection will be always stable and high bitrate make the drone a thin client.
Not a realtime os though
True but, IMHO, a lot of the higher level task should be able to handle it. I guess you can have a simple real time IC to handle the flight envelope to provide stable flight and then use the iPhone to do the advanced operations. For example, if you are building a drone that is mapping the environment and follows you through a bike ride, does it really matter if the 3D environment it creates for autonomous navigation is slightly off? You can continuously compensate for it, stick with moving averages and avoid extreme moves.
That real-time controller still needs the IMU sensors, which is maybe what GP was responding to. (Your iPhone could have an additional set of them, but the ones on the phone don't do any good to the real-time subsystem.)
Oh, I got an accelerometer card for that. It's very small and cheap, there are also cards that contain a gyro + barometer. So if the phone ones are not real-time enough cheap options exist.
Hence a microcontroller for flight control. The iPhone can just decide on the higher level tasks and send control signals to the microcontroller, similar to how a microcontroller delegates tasks to the underlying hardware peripherals.
imo "realtime" is such a misnomer. It should be re-termed as "jitter minimized" or "loop interval stabilized" or something along that.
Fun! I built a Crazyflie[1] back in the day which was bespoke 2.4GHz protocols (no ESP32 at the time) so this is a great upgrade to that. Also the use of a single low side MOSFET as the motor controller makes it simpler and cheaper at the expense of some moves that BLDC motors give you. All in all, at $10 - $15 that is a great deal and I'm wondering if one will show up in a Hackerbox[2] as that is exactly the kind of thing they do.
I have had a lot of fun playing with the CF microdrones, I'm definitely going to build one of these too.
[1] https://github.com/bitcraze/crazyflie-firmware
[2] https://hackerboxes.com/
What a great time for this article! The US is having a mass hysteria event and it turns out you can churn out DYI drones for the fat sum of $12-13 each? What a time to be alive!
Edit: Hmm, considering that people are taking stars for UFOs lately, maybe a cheap drone is an overkill and a 20-pack of Chinese sky lanterns would be more than enough to keep the average US neighbourhood in a state of constant fear / see how long it takes for you to get to the front page of /r/UFOs...
Judging from the posts I’ve seen, others have already started. Someone had a drone with a lit Roman candle going the other day. Or it was FAA compliant aliens. One of the two.
[flagged]
Welcome to hacker News! Yes, we find ignorance funny. I think people adding fuel to the fire are the ones freaking out about aliens or Iranian mother ships. Pointing out that the this is a hysteria event is more akin to pouring water on the flames.
No, it is not "Hacker News" to paint a large swath of people as "ignorant". The proper way would have been to publish a detailed, technical analysis and present your ideas along with your proof to the greater community and facilitate a discussion.
I want to live in this world, where we're all part of a larger collective endeavor to discover the truth, to be more informed, learn continuously, and evolve together. That's the old-school philosophy and mission of science for the betterment of humanity.
I like your optimism. Personally, I have found that, if someone freaks out about "alien drones", trying to facilitate a discussion is almost futile.
Large swathes of people are ignorant, though. It's just that now they can demonstrate that loudly on social media.
I think it's kinda both. Besides, everyone's ignorant about something.
https://xkcd.com/1053/
My guy, there are government officials that are sharing photos of the Orion constellation stating that it's a drone swarm just standing there over their property...
[dead]
i see it as just accelerating normalizing cheap drones everywhere.
https://x.com/ufoofinterest/status/1867668810171605394
https://x.com/DJSnM/status/1867763872465400226
https://x.com/TakeThatClouds/status/1867866332034932915
https://x.com/MatthewCappucci/status/1868052013164134899
It’s like throwing matches into a dumpster fire.
> The US is having a mass hysteria event
What is this in reference to? The Chinese weather-balloon drama was years ago, wasn't it?
https://apnews.com/article/drones-new-jersey-what-to-know-e6...
Thanks!
> Authorities say many of the drone sightings have actually been legal drones, manned aircraft, helicopters and even stars.
> many state and municipal lawmakers have called for stricter rules about who can fly unmanned aircraft — and for the authority to shoot them down.
Hard to find a more American article than this.
The interesting/scary part is that its not that hard to weaponise these drones. You can make one drop a home made explosive pretty easily, fully autonomous. and then dump itself into a body of water. All for way less cost than a gun.
I don’t know what drone you’re talking about but you absolutely cannot make a tiny Wi-Fi drone autonomous or drop things for less than a cost of a gun, every part of your statement is wrong. Currently anyone smart enough to build drone with 7 inch propellers and programmable GPS waypoints, improvised explosives … 3d printed release mechanism .. probably has a pretty good paying job and doesn’t see the value proposition of blowing things up
You know what you can easily do drive a truck into a crowd of people or fill your car with explosives in park it under a building and then blow up the entire building, but people aren’t doing that every day but continue whingeing about drones
Autonomous isn’t a problem, the open source firmwares for drones include fully autonomous mode. I don’t know if this particular one does but it should be easy to port. The size and range, however, doesn’t make this particular drone very scary.
I find it funny that the US is so obsessed with infantry firearms and surgical strikes that people think those are the best "ways to go" for certain things. I guess not a bad thing considering we don't need any improved means for those stuffs...
It's not scary when it is just a hypothetical. If this were happening with some frequency it would be concerning. Until then I suspect there is something you are overlooking, oversimplifying.
(EDIT: I'm assuming you are talking about non-military use.)
> home made explosive
With this a lot of damage can be done even without drone. As for weaponized it's not a future, it's a reality in Ukraine for years now. Defense against them is difficult to impossible. A bodyguard who can sacrifice himself may sometimes work.
[dead]
Or if you don't want to do it from scratch, you can get a programmable readymade for a little more: https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stamp-fly-with-m5stamps3...
The included software stack is very basic, dig around on Japanese nerd Twitter for open source avionics.
Right, but it's 3x the price and out of stock :(
This is amazing. Even the landing gear (struts?) is part of the PCB. I hope the author considers selling kits or outsourcing kits to SeedStudio. I live in a country where digikey order shipping is quite pricey.
The author estimates the BOM to be a little under US$13. At that price it would be fun to try create a swarm for DIY drone lights show.
[1] https://circuitdigest.com/microcontroller-projects/DIY-wifi-...
FWIW, making just 10 might drive that $13 price down quite a bit.
Although, it looks like 1 unit might be closer to $50 (at least for the suppliers I might use), but $150 for 10.
I think costs could be cut somewhat though. The USB->serial chip is nearly $6, but differently packaged it can be $4.40 for 1 or $3.99/ea for 10, and alternative chips that seem like they should be good enough can be cheaper still. The voltage regulator they chose is $1/ea for 500ma, while the one I would normally go to is $0.22/ea for 1000ma (dropping down to $0.13/ea for 10).
Does it need a regulator at all? ESP32 should be able to run on raw battery voltage, assuming the ESP is necessary. RealTek TX2/RX2 + PIC10/ATTiny10/CH32V003 could be even cheaper if user is okay with a dedicated transmitter.
If you're making lots, you could uncouple the programming interface which isn't needed while in flight, thereby saving both BOM and weight.
Which is your go-to voltage regulator?
It's odd, considering this is digikey, that there isn't a "Buy now" button.
I'd totally do that if I got everything shipped to me, and knew I wasn't forgetting something.
There’s a small link at the bottom to “Add all DigiKey Parts to Cart.”
But one of the parts is apparently already obsolete and unavailable, and two more have minimum quantities above what’s needed here, so it’s not great.
But one of the parts is apparently already obsolete and unavailable
I love Digikey, but unfortunately this is not uncommon at all.
To answer the question asked by the [dead] commenter: because every other electronic component distributor site (with the exception of Mouser, which is basically DigiKey with a different stylesheet) is much worse.
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this is amazing. on similar note, I have spent last few months trying to fit visual inertial odometry into esp32. Combining that with this would be insane (and so cheap!)
I've had similar thoughts and have been working on firmwares for the esp32. My contact info is in my profile. Hollar at me and lets compare notes.
i don’t see your contact info.
My mistake. Updated.
I wonder what differs in the hardware (other than obviously using the newer esp32) compared to the implementation in this vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3n76iMTHXuE
tldw: he experienced significant packet latency while the motors were spinning, making the drone uncontrollable.
I played with €25 foldable wifi drone from Lidl until EU started requiring €30 fee annual for a camera drone.
I cannot think much practical use for drone without a camera. Fly-fishing might be one, but I need to program it so that it drops the line and returns home the moment it feels fish yanking.
EU doesn't require a €30 annual fee for a camera drone, though. Your country might. Mine surely doesn't.
Drone reg here in Ireland (over 250g or with a camera its required) €38 for two years.
https://www.iaa.ie/general-aviation/drones/drone-register
How much lift can a 30€ drone produce? A 600 gram trout could easily drag the drone underwater unless it is ridiculously overpowered.
"drops the line" == does not even try, me myself reel the fish in.
Is this just someone reposting espressif's esp-drone (https://github.com/espressif/esp-drone) and passing it off as their own (and DigiKey posting it on their site)? They talk about making a custom PCB, but it looks pretty much the same.
The repository linked from the article (https://github.com/Circuit-Digest/ESP-Drone) has some issues claiming there's malware in it, and the commit history looks a little suspicious, but I could be wrong.
Since those who filed the issue did not even stated which file is affected this is pure speculation but the virus issue really look like a false positive. The pre-built firmware checked into a repo could easily trigger an anti-virus.
The repo is mostly made of plain text files, the zip and the bin don't look required for anything so if your feeling paranoid delete them before building!
Wow, yeah, I thought Espressif just wrote the firmware, but this drone is really really similar to the one posted, PCB struts and all.
damn you are right!
love everything here but I'm skeptical of real time control via wifi. for me there's always been a noticeable delay in video streaming and receiving control signal so I'm curious how this works?
The feature question is: can it transport an RPG head?
> Do you guys find this funny? Adding fuel to the fire?
If you can't beat them, join them it seems?
I just saw the two comments in question and find it to be absolutely hilarious.
A serious answer to your question - no, these are in the "whoop" weight-class. Warhead carrying drones for anti-personnel and anti-armor are usually 10 inch and up, meaning they are using "10 inch" frames and likely 3115 motors, with 6S battery packs. Of course, there's endless variation, but that seems to be a optimum combination
Ukrainians and Russians use 7" drones for dropping grenades and suicide charges. This does not seem too far off?
Whoops and 7" drones are pretty far apart (depending on what you consider "far", I guess). Whoops can barely lift their own weight, 7" drones can carry maybe a kilo.
A 7” drone can happily carry about 1.5kg which is more than sufficient to carry a RPG shell.
Most RPG warheads are pretty heavy.
Maybe he was just looking for people that agree with him?
I find it hilarious to think that this was just an honest question and we downvoted him unfairly.
Is the custom circuit board something that mortals can get made? That seems to be the sticky point to me.
Yup. About fifteen years ago there was an explosion in small-run PCB services that cater to hobbyists (and cottage-scale professionals). If you don't need them overnight you can get good quality PCBs made at a very reasonable price.
99% of hobbyist PCBs are can be ordered from JLCPCB nowadays.
As long the PCBs have no components on them it's very cheap.
Even if they have components on them, that's only $1-$2 extra per board (depending on the components), JLCPCB will assemble all the common components (resistors, capacitors, some more exotic ones) for very cheap, and you can solder the rest yourself. Their PCB assembly saves so much time, I don't want to waste half an hour soldering 20 0805 resistors to save $0.30 any more.
JLCPCB assembly services are so cheap as long as you don't use components marked as extended!
I don't solder passive components anymore and now mostly use 0402 (that i am not able to solder reliably) instead of the bigger 0805. If you value your time and don't derive pleasure from soldering passive components, try the assembly services!
just upload it to jlcpcb and get it delivered with components soldered.
i wish this didn’t use mpu6050 imu, which is obsolete and unavailable it seems.
but i guess they used it due to existing code/drivers widely available for it and esp32.
Feels like a poor fit, given the limited number of cores available.
Would be awesome to see rp2350 or some such, where there are very low power io cores available that can do work whether the main core is on or not. Embedded really is one of the best places for many-core, but it's so so rare there are good offload architectures and puny Programmable IO systems.
Should out to folks like Silego/Dialog/Renesas with their GreenPAK; ultra tiny but interesting mixed signal little bits of programmable logic with a healthy dollop of peripherals!
Calling the RP2350's PIO units "low power io cores" is quite an exaggeration. Although they are technically turing-complete with a lot of hacking, they are absolutely awful at any kind of compute. Heck, you probably don't even want to let it handle UART parity calculation!
If anything the ESP32's Ultra-Low-Power Coprocessor would be perfect for such applications - but realistically it isn't worth the effort. Compute power usage is going to be negligible compared to what is needed for wifi and rotors, and running multiple realtime tasks on a single core isn't exactly rocket science either.
You don't need more cores. Ardupilot runs on much less capable hardware https://ardupilot.org/copter/docs/common-autopilots.html#com..., we've sent people to the moon with less capable hardware. More cores just make things more complicated.
With the power budget of a drone almost any board will do.
note: appears to use an outdated esp-idf. worth checking to see if esp-drone has been ported a newer esp-idf.
Meta: This has to be one of the most aggressively blocked pages I've encountered as it refuses to render any content if you have an adblocker on (uBlock at least) and resists several forms of archiving.
I also had the worst anti robot thing ever. I had to hold a button for what feels like 10s. Who does that?
I'm able to access the site with uBlock Origin.
Same here on firefox/linux. Is that IP dependent?
Same here
Odd, it's just fine for me on firefox/ublock origin.
I'm also using firefox/ublock but I'm getting the mentioned agressively-blocked page. I'm also using a VPN, if that makes any difference.
I also see the extremely light "Press & Hold" message to prove I am not a bot. I missed it the first few times I loaded the page because my eyes just don't pick up on things like that very easily (I'm the guy who turns the brightness up in video games with a lot of shadow). Not only does this press & hold action seem to be ineffective, but they made a message that some humans have trouble seem to keep bots out? Smdh.
Which is disappointing, because I've ordered from digikey countless times, both for work and for personal projects. There should be absolutely no reason they clamp down on people using adblockers since they are highly profitable already. Guess I'll be looking for a different parts source.
uBlock on, pihole on the net - not sure what it dislikes more.
I see a screen (light grey on white) which reads something along to "Press & hold" some button to confirm i'm human. Which does nothing, because of adblocking?
Well, f* you then - let me find something different to read :)
This will work (make sure you check the video at the bottom):
https://circuitdigest.com/microcontroller-projects/DIY-wifi-...
Even with uBlock and Cookie AutoDelete disabled it doesn't work.
OK. Then I'll order my stuff from Mouser in the future.