| > 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. Your information is very out of date. DJI sells their camera and video unit as a standalone part that you can put in your hobby drone. They're on the 3rd generation right now with the 4th coming out soon https://www.dji.com/o3-air-unit If you want the DJI video feed, you just buy this unit for under $200 and put it in your drone. You get the same video technology as the COTS DJI unit and it integrates with your open-source controller. > 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. The STM processors have more than enough power to operate the drone. I think you're missing the point of hobby drones and their controllers. They don't need or even want LTE, Starlink, or any of the other complications you mention. They just need to get up in the air and fly cheaply. The current products work well for that. People have tried to build drones around Raspberry Pi gear but there's no advantage and a lot of additional cost, size, and weight for something that doesn't help at all. I don't think people realize how powerful the top STM microcontrollers are these days. > 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. Most of what you posted has been tried in open source. It's just not really beneficial or interesting. You can cobble together an LTE drone if you want, but you can't legally fly it past line of sight anyway, so what's the point? For what it's worth, hobby drones are miles ahead of the COTS drones when it comes to fast flying and control. The gear from DJI is great if you want to safely fly a camera up and hover around, but if you want a fast and challenging drone you basically have to DIY. |