Learning to fly FPV drones with AI flight coach | Hacker News Reader

Learning to fly FPV drones with AI flight coach

blog.divyendusingh.com

18 pointsdivyenduz8 comments

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In 2012-2015 ish, I was building FPV quads, planes for universities.

(I say quad because at the time we were staunch drones kill people….)

I really don’t think you need ai for any of this.

The stuff today is so easy plug and play. There’s so many groups you can connect with.

It’s also much more durable.

I don’t see a lot of discussion by the author about transmitter (TX) or receiver (RX) choices. Which are important.

Fatshark goggles are a great choice for most people.

If someone is having fun though, I don’t want to dissuade them. But focus on the fun. Practice flying. Practice flying line of sight. Then focus more on fpv.

But focusing on how the things work (and less worry about the batteries… quality charger, quality battery - high c rate for most small quads…)

Brushless motors help a lot for longevity.

All that said, in the hobby I’m back to los nitro planes, as that’s what I find most relaxing and enjoyable.

I’ll occasionally fly 200-450mm size quads, sometimes even fpv, but it’s just not as much fun to me.

In fact, I think the most fun fpv flying is with something more akin to a sky surfer, up a bit higher, longer flight time, etc.

But again— everyone’s fun is different - however I would still encourage not using ai, and trying to understand how different components are working together.

Truly the stuff today is so much easier , no bind plugs usually, no crystals, no lengthy manual pid tuning.

But I will stand by understanding the transmitter receiver tech, both for controlling and for video, and not so much focusing on what’s needed battery storage, but instead on how the power system as a whole is working, along with things like prop pitch, your motor type, etc will lead to a better grasp of what’s going on.

Simulator time as well, while good for some initial practice, tends to be very detached from The real world experience at the RC level.

So, today was my second day piloting drones ever. I am absolutely not sure what I would need any bit of AI for... it is quite enjoyable to zip around the trees here.

I did the same process as the "author", namely Joshua Bardwell's videos and tutorials Liftoff using a remote, and now I have a tinywhoop and analog goggles.

But it was mostly just normal practice and learning in the sim (I have maybe 25-35h of time in that) which has translated pretty well to the actual drone. I was able to fly around my yard pretty well. I don't think I'd have had as much luck if I'd not crashed many hundreds of times in a simulator.

For me, the amount of thought outsourced to LLMs has been a bit strange lately. Like, I just puzzled this stuff out and followed a couple of videos other folks had made on Youtube. It's just not that complex these days and there are plenty of (human intelligence) resources already.

I remember building my first quadcopter with kk5.5, it was a fun time indeed, and the technology has gone really far

The video at the beginning looks disturbingly enough like training to hunt humans, or hunt drones that do that, in east Ukraine or something.

Any video looks disturbingly enough like human hunting if that's what you're looking for.

One man's human hunting trainer(I guess) is another man's Tony Hawk's Pro Skater in the 2020's.

Ehhh there's a lot of knowledge on the websites, freely available, for anyone who wants to read. Sometimes it might seem conflicting though. But there's a community who's used to responding to the same questions over and over again. Asking an LLM is no different and there's no extra value; I'd say you're even losing the community aspect of it. The only somewhat fun part is getting it to make a virtual map of your place - decent starting point. I wrote a similar guide/blog post - although it seems it's not caught in by Google for whatever reason so you can't find it easily...

Thanks for the comment, author here "losing the community aspect of it", this assumes that I only use LLM for that, and that's not true. I am involved in communities via both Discord servers (recommend the one from The Zone simulator) and local meetups too.

"lot of knowledge on the websites, freely available, for anyone who wants to read", of course, I read that a lot as I mentioned in parts of the blog post, I didn't want to out source "learning" and I did many things the hard way i.e. reading + understanding and continue to do so.

LLMs were mostly useful in two things: - I could make a copy of my apartment (it is much more accurate by now) and I can practice simulator and real life in the same place. This is why the creator of The Zone built it too. This without AI would have been a multi week project for me and with AI it was a 2-3 day on the side thing. - When debugging settings things up, I can give it access to read the real data from my devices, videos. No online reading has that context and can translate that into insights quick. It is more about speed than AI.

I also mentioned "what's learning anyways" at the bottom of the post, FPV flying is a good example because unlike say writing content or software or creating something the AI can't do it (it can fly drones with IMU, GPS but not tiny whoops) for you and can only assist you.

Would be curious about your blog post on the subject btw. Won't mind you sharing that.

you know, i think this is great and thank you for sharing

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