[StavrosK]

Head trackers are cool, but DJI stuff is a step in the wrong direction there. Right now everything is open, you can write a small Arduino script to track your head with an accelerometer, send the channels through your radio to the drone, and add two servos there that move according to your head motions.

With DJI, all of this is closed. I'd be surprised if you can connect/have access to any of these things.

[wpearse]

DJI has a pretty comprehensive SDK, I’m pretty sure that they’ve published the tools you need to do this.

[05]

Well, nobody is stopping the community from making their own open source/open hardware OpenTX based motion flight controller, do they? Just like Naza32 didn’t prevent people from developing Cleanflight/Betaflight

[StavrosK]

Are you saying that because they aren't actively coming to your house and holding your hands away from the keyboard, the fact that they sell closed source hardware is neutral?

[05]

It’s actually positive. Open source community has limited resources, so DJI proving this thing can be made to work well removes any uncertainty someone would have when starting their own project without that knowledge. It also affects the way people look at the feature - previously many would just automatically dismiss it as a useless gimmick, but DJI implementing it and people liking their implementation gives the idea credibility.

[StavrosK]

So the only reason nobody implemented digital video systems until now is that they weren't sure if it could be done, and DJI locking their stuff down is actually good for the hobby.

[05]

OpenHD. If you fly wings and 135ms latency doesn't bother you, you can build it yourself. Of course, it uses Raspberry Pi's proprietary Broadcom SoC h264 encoder, so much for open :)

Is TBS locking their proprietary protocol they use to differentiate themselves from commodity Semtech ICs good for the hobby?