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Can you recommend a good drone with an open source stack? I would very much like to buy one but it is unclear which are comparable or better than something I wo

Can you recommend a good drone with an open source stack? I would very much like to buy one but it is unclear which are comparable or better than something I would buy from DJI.

voakbasda 3y ago
The PX4 stack would be where I would start if I were in the market to buy today. They have a list of compatible hardware and drones, including some relatively off-the-shelf drones. The list of drones provides a lot of detail about the various levels of support and functionality available.
- mcculley 3y ago
  I just went to the PX4 website and found a lot of broken links. Do you have any experience with fully open source drones that you can recommend?
  - saidinesh5 3y ago
    I think they meant this page: https://px4.io/ecosystem/commercial-systems/ https://px4.io/ecosystem/commercial-systems/ But it depends on your budget/use case really (just to fly around with a camera like payload, drone racing, autonomous missions using gps). A lot of the drones out there use a lot of open source software for one thing or another. Ardupilot, PX4, Betaflight, iNav etc.. are open source drone flight control software which run on drone flight controllers. flight controller = a little microcontroller + gyro/accelerometer + connections to some peripherals like radio receivers , GPS, sensors like sonar etc. Blheli_S, AM32 etc.. are Open Source ESC firmware. ESC = Electronic Speed Controller. The component that is responsible to spin the motors as the flight controller wants it to. Sik Radio, ExpressLRS, mLRS etc.. are Open Source RC control link software that let you send control messages from your ground station to your drone. As for Video Transmission, you can use anything from OpenHD/wifibroadcast(doesn't use Wifi. just Wifi hardware in monitor mode.) to webrtc over 4g to transmit video from quad to your ground station. And optionally record it on the drone side too. Mix and match these open source components to build your own drone as per your needs. I mostly fly racing drones and every single component on my quads is open source to one extent or another.
    - mcculley 3y ago
      That’s the page I went to that led me to some 404s I appreciate all of the info you have supplied. I would very much like to buy a complete multicopter to which I can add payloads and program routes/waypoints and otherwise customize. Do you or anyone else reading this have good experience with any vendors of open source drones?
      - saidinesh5 3y ago
        How about this? https://newbeedrone.com/products/holybro-px4-development-kit-x500-v2 https://newbeedrone.com/products/holybro-px4-development-kit... Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27rbxCeCq4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27rbxCeCq4Y I have used some holybro products and they work well. Seems like a lot of "ready to fly" kits/models have disappeared these days. I am guessing the new drone regulations have something to do with it. If you are a little more adventurous (i.e dont mind soldering/assembling your own drone), you'd be able to build a quad for a LOT smaller/cheaper.
        mcculley 3y ago
        Wow. That looks great. Thanks.
        saidinesh5 3y ago
        If you're ordering this one, Dont forget to order a lipo battery or two and battery charger. That is not included in this kit. Also a transmitter like Radiomaster pocket and a receiver would be very handy. Iirc you can use a regular joystick with QGroundControl but I prefer to have a separate strong control link that will let you recover the quad if the connection to ground station is lost.
bri3d 3y ago
There is nothing that comes close to DJI for a flying camera, and I don't say this as a fanboy but rather as someone who has been in this industry in various capacities for a long time. Ardupilot and PX4 are great projects, but they're just a basic ingredient in making a drone with good autonomy. They handle the basics of stabilizing a multicopter or plane (with a lot of tuning required) and have some rudimentary range finding and optical flow support, but don't offer much in the way of state-of-the-art vision based autonomy for position hold, obstacle avoidance, or route planning. Even in the commercial space (where a lot of stuff is based on PX4, it's BSD licensed so products don't need to be source-available), nothing really gets close to DJI. On the other end of the hobby drone space, INAV and Betaflight are fun, but they're mostly for FPV which is a completely different ball game. The gaps for full open source _and_ non-DJI commercial drones are numerous. Really they're pretty much end-to-end: * Vision autonomy. There are a _ton_ of UAV vision autonomy projects on GitHub, mostly because it's a popular thesis project. Unfortunately, none of them have taken off as a practical, well-maintained thing you can integrate into normal drone hardware and use. In the commercial space, Skydio finally got a good win here, but they've given up on the consumer market. This isn't just a critical feature for whiz-bang inside-out pathing like Skydio do, it's an important fundamental for strong position hold (called visual odometry) as GPS is drift-prone and traditional low resolution optical flow struggles once a drone is at a higher altitude. * Camera image sensor quality. This is the place where Skydio really fell behind DJI in the consumer market. This is a highly proprietary, closely guarded space. It's almost impossible to find a good image sensor plus the parameters to make it look good (ISP firmware / sensor parameterization) that's not locked under 100 levels of NDA. Add on the need for specialized optics and you're in for a really tall order. Even the Pi Foundation essentially gave up on this and ship a DRMed camera with proprietary ISP parameterization. * Video downlink. This is a big one too, and one of the other big places where Skydio fell behind. DJI and Autel have access to modified mobile phone IP via China. Everyone else is using either analog video or WiFi and it just isn't good. * Camera gimbal quality. Ardupilot did a GSoC project around this recently. This space is really underinvested too. Making a good gimbal is _hard_, and it goes hand-in-hand with the camera sensor issue in some ways because making a gimbal which is weight/balance-matched to a specific camera is a lot easier than a general purpose one. Also, most open source projects spent a long time focused on on bottom-facing survey / photogrammetry use cases because they were easier, so basic features like "aim/zoom to a tapped point on a video" aren't fully baked at all. * Battery quality and parameters. Open source / hobby drones tend to use either polymer-electrolyte prismatic pouch packs with extremely high instantaneous discharge but comparatively low overall capacity (FPV drones) or round-cell lithium ion batteries with good overall capacity, but poor instantaneous discharge and poor packaging. The optimal battery for a small camera drone is right between these two extremes. Even in the commercial space, I'd recommend DJI. Autel is basically one generation behind DJI at a higher price point. Skydio drones were cool but they exited the consumer market, and they were loud and had bad cameras and a weak video link compared to their contemporary DJI rivals. Parrot are interesting as a non-Chinese option, but they're about two generations behind DJI, also at an even higher price point. If you want a camera drone today, buy a DJI drone with a standalone remote controller (the one with a screen). That way, you don't need to install their sketchy app on your phone, you can firewall the controller however you'd like, and you only need to give up limited information as part of the initial activation/login process and then you're good to go.

Can you recommend a good drone with an open source stack? I would very much like to buy one but it is unclear which are comparable or better than something I would buy from DJI.

voakbasda 3y ago

The PX4 stack would be where I would start if I were in the market to buy today. They have a list of compatible hardware and drones, including some relatively off-the-shelf drones. The list of drones provides a lot of detail about the various levels of support and functionality available.

mcculley 3y ago
I just went to the PX4 website and found a lot of broken links. Do you have any experience with fully open source drones that you can recommend?
- saidinesh5 3y ago
  I think they meant this page: https://px4.io/ecosystem/commercial-systems/ https://px4.io/ecosystem/commercial-systems/ But it depends on your budget/use case really (just to fly around with a camera like payload, drone racing, autonomous missions using gps). A lot of the drones out there use a lot of open source software for one thing or another. Ardupilot, PX4, Betaflight, iNav etc.. are open source drone flight control software which run on drone flight controllers. flight controller = a little microcontroller + gyro/accelerometer + connections to some peripherals like radio receivers , GPS, sensors like sonar etc. Blheli_S, AM32 etc.. are Open Source ESC firmware. ESC = Electronic Speed Controller. The component that is responsible to spin the motors as the flight controller wants it to. Sik Radio, ExpressLRS, mLRS etc.. are Open Source RC control link software that let you send control messages from your ground station to your drone. As for Video Transmission, you can use anything from OpenHD/wifibroadcast(doesn't use Wifi. just Wifi hardware in monitor mode.) to webrtc over 4g to transmit video from quad to your ground station. And optionally record it on the drone side too. Mix and match these open source components to build your own drone as per your needs. I mostly fly racing drones and every single component on my quads is open source to one extent or another.
  - mcculley 3y ago
    That’s the page I went to that led me to some 404s I appreciate all of the info you have supplied. I would very much like to buy a complete multicopter to which I can add payloads and program routes/waypoints and otherwise customize. Do you or anyone else reading this have good experience with any vendors of open source drones?
    - saidinesh5 3y ago
      How about this? https://newbeedrone.com/products/holybro-px4-development-kit-x500-v2 https://newbeedrone.com/products/holybro-px4-development-kit... Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27rbxCeCq4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27rbxCeCq4Y I have used some holybro products and they work well. Seems like a lot of "ready to fly" kits/models have disappeared these days. I am guessing the new drone regulations have something to do with it. If you are a little more adventurous (i.e dont mind soldering/assembling your own drone), you'd be able to build a quad for a LOT smaller/cheaper.
      - mcculley 3y ago
        Wow. That looks great. Thanks.
        saidinesh5 3y ago
        If you're ordering this one, Dont forget to order a lipo battery or two and battery charger. That is not included in this kit. Also a transmitter like Radiomaster pocket and a receiver would be very handy. Iirc you can use a regular joystick with QGroundControl but I prefer to have a separate strong control link that will let you recover the quad if the connection to ground station is lost.

bri3d 3y ago

There is nothing that comes close to DJI for a flying camera, and I don't say this as a fanboy but rather as someone who has been in this industry in various capacities for a long time. Ardupilot and PX4 are great projects, but they're just a basic ingredient in making a drone with good autonomy. They handle the basics of stabilizing a multicopter or plane (with a lot of tuning required) and have some rudimentary range finding and optical flow support, but don't offer much in the way of state-of-the-art vision based autonomy for position hold, obstacle avoidance, or route planning. Even in the commercial space (where a lot of stuff is based on PX4, it's BSD licensed so products don't need to be source-available), nothing really gets close to DJI. On the other end of the hobby drone space, INAV and Betaflight are fun, but they're mostly for FPV which is a completely different ball game. The gaps for full open source _and_ non-DJI commercial drones are numerous. Really they're pretty much end-to-end: * Vision autonomy. There are a _ton_ of UAV vision autonomy projects on GitHub, mostly because it's a popular thesis project. Unfortunately, none of them have taken off as a practical, well-maintained thing you can integrate into normal drone hardware and use. In the commercial space, Skydio finally got a good win here, but they've given up on the consumer market. This isn't just a critical feature for whiz-bang inside-out pathing like Skydio do, it's an important fundamental for strong position hold (called visual odometry) as GPS is drift-prone and traditional low resolution optical flow struggles once a drone is at a higher altitude. * Camera image sensor quality. This is the place where Skydio really fell behind DJI in the consumer market. This is a highly proprietary, closely guarded space. It's almost impossible to find a good image sensor plus the parameters to make it look good (ISP firmware / sensor parameterization) that's not locked under 100 levels of NDA. Add on the need for specialized optics and you're in for a really tall order. Even the Pi Foundation essentially gave up on this and ship a DRMed camera with proprietary ISP parameterization. * Video downlink. This is a big one too, and one of the other big places where Skydio fell behind. DJI and Autel have access to modified mobile phone IP via China. Everyone else is using either analog video or WiFi and it just isn't good. * Camera gimbal quality. Ardupilot did a GSoC project around this recently. This space is really underinvested too. Making a good gimbal is _hard_, and it goes hand-in-hand with the camera sensor issue in some ways because making a gimbal which is weight/balance-matched to a specific camera is a lot easier than a general purpose one. Also, most open source projects spent a long time focused on on bottom-facing survey / photogrammetry use cases because they were easier, so basic features like "aim/zoom to a tapped point on a video" aren't fully baked at all. * Battery quality and parameters. Open source / hobby drones tend to use either polymer-electrolyte prismatic pouch packs with extremely high instantaneous discharge but comparatively low overall capacity (FPV drones) or round-cell lithium ion batteries with good overall capacity, but poor instantaneous discharge and poor packaging. The optimal battery for a small camera drone is right between these two extremes. Even in the commercial space, I'd recommend DJI. Autel is basically one generation behind DJI at a higher price point. Skydio drones were cool but they exited the consumer market, and they were loud and had bad cameras and a weak video link compared to their contemporary DJI rivals. Parrot are interesting as a non-Chinese option, but they're about two generations behind DJI, also at an even higher price point. If you want a camera drone today, buy a DJI drone with a standalone remote controller (the one with a screen). That way, you don't need to install their sketchy app on your phone, you can firewall the controller however you'd like, and you only need to give up limited information as part of the initial activation/login process and then you're good to go.