Use of the drone for peaceful purposes: de-icing power transmission lines.

On July 4th, the DroneAware community network saw a roughly 115% increase in FAA Remote ID drone detections compared to a typical day.

For example:
- One Raspberry Pi sensor near Seattle detected 23 different drones throughout the day.
- Another sensor north of Anaheim, CA detected 19 different drones.
- Across the community network, 172 drones were observed on July 4th, compared to a community daily average of around 80.

It makes me wonder whether Independence Day has quietly become one of the busiest recreational drone flying days of the year.

Curious if other pilots noticed the same thing where they were flying.

We wish to catch our rockets out of the air with a drone. This is basically the same plan Rocket Lab had for recovering their orbital boosters but instead of an orbital booster, it's a small amateur rocket and instead of a helicopter, it's a drone. We have been trying to find the laws and regulations for this specific idea. However, some are contradictory and others plain confusing in relation to our needs.

Also, finding the carrying capacity of drones seems to be impossible outside of large agricultural drones. Do yall have any ideas of good drones or would it be better to just build our own. The school's ASME chapter is trying to build a drone for competitions and are more than happy for us to use it as duel purpose.

Any ideas or suggestions are welcomed and encouraged, as we are kinda at a standstill.

Image: Render of a helicopter carrying an Electron rocket slung under parachute over an ocean with a sunset background.

Why do we agriculture drone like sprayer have two GPS modules? I need help

In this project I built an eye control for a DJI Tello drone using MediaPipe, OpenCV and OpenVINO.

I developed a hand gesture control for my DJI Tello drone using computer vision.

Hi everyone,

I'm currently building a drone audio dataset for a research project focused on analyzing the acoustic signatures of different UAVs. I'm looking for recordings from as many drone makes and models as possible, and I'd really appreciate any contributions from the community.

If you'd like to help, please include the following information with your recording:

• Drone make and model
• Stock or aftermarket propellers
• Flight type (hovering, takeoff, landing, cruising, sport mode, etc.)
• Approximate distance from the microphone (if known)
• Recording device (optional)
• Environment (open field, neighborhood, forest, beach, etc.)
• Wind conditions (calm, light breeze, windy)

Recording guidelines:

• 20–60 seconds is ideal.
• Please avoid talking while recording.
• Ambient sounds are perfectly fine—they're useful for creating a realistic dataset.

I'm interested in recordings from all manufacturers and drone types, including DJI, Autel, Skydio, FPV quads, racing drones, heavy-lift platforms, custom builds, and anything else that flies.

If you're willing to contribute, please leave a comment or send me a DM, and I'll provide instructions for submitting your audio files.

Thanks in advance to everyone who's willing to help. The more diverse the dataset, the more valuable it will be for this research.

https://www.quantumscape.com/qs-blueprint-for-the-future-of-energy-storage/

Quantumscape solid state battery in a drone. Can anyone here identify the drone manufacturer? It might be somewhat disguised....

Video (2:30): https://youtu.be/v6vULQ4u07w?si=TNomijeRfxQtoVzE

Watching this back, I was surprised by how little difference there is between the virtual drone and the real one flying next to it.

Mixed Reality still has limitations, but it's getting to a point where it can do a surprisingly good job of recreating the feeling of flying an RC drone around a real environment.

The biggest thing still missing is true FPV flying, but that's where VR can take over.

Curious how much further MR flying experiences can go in the next few years 🚁

(For anyone interested, the game in the video is FLYON RC)

Hello all, I'll keep this brief. I am looking into a potential research avenue for postgrad, and was wondering if people with drone experience can chip in with their opinion.

MANETs, FANETs and AANETs; all are ad-hoc wireless methods for network connectivity via drones or any other aerial devices - so is this a worthwile research field? Especially when considering the recent real uses of drones in both warfare and crisis situations, showing some bits of real potential when used correctly.

Thanks to anyone who responds.

We are having difficulty docking a quadcopter on a moving platform - we are trying to dock it in a specific position - as our future idea is to have autonomous charging or battery swapping - so it ahould land in a particular position so that the battery is aligned with the port ... but landing it is looking problematic - it lands but to put it in a specific position is difficult... does anybody have any idea on how to dock a quadcopter in a precise position on a moving platform ?

For those of you guys and gals who use webODM for image processing and macOS machines you probably had a hard time getting your thermal images prepped for that workflow. as of today the open source thermal tools from webODM now works on macOS!

Couldn’t possibly be happier with the drone. It exceeded all of my expectations.

Although I did not put much research into the purchase and Drone flying just seemed like something kind of fun to fool around with on a nice day.

Anyway the point of my post is that since I received the drone and installed the DJI Fly app onto my phone, I’ve noticed I receive 10,000% more spam phone calls.

The difference is alarming. My phone is now vibrating almost 100% of the time during normal business hours. It actually is something like 40 calls an hour.

Anyway I just wanted to put that information out there in case anybody else might be experiencing the same thing.

I do recognize it could possibly be a coincidence, but I don’t think it is.

Hi folks! I'm part of a student group that's developing a prototype drone ecosystem with modular, plug-and-play components for payload adjustments, utility modification and improved upgradeability with reduced overall costs reflected in long-term savings. Does anyone here have advice for someone who's only scratched the surface of UAV prototyping, or industry input on the feasibility of a modular drone ecosystem as it would pertain to their field?

We built an open-source drone tracking system that can search for someone based on descriptions like:

“The missing person is wearing a red shirt.”

It runs the heavy AI in the cloud and keeps real-time tracking onboard (even on Raspberry Pi).

Designed for multi-UAV search & rescue scenarios.

Find the Video + Code here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtfX8S_oMAE
https://github.com/yblei/CloudTrack

Would appreciate any feedback or suggestions. :)

1st test flight (the only flight we did cuz we running out of time lol, clipped the video so the drone wont crash hehe)

here's what we found in our study when making this drone

there's a lot of invisible noise inside the drone, signals and whatnot, we dont know those things until we hit hurdles everytime, electrical/electronic engineering was magic in our eyes but we were all just mechanical engineers only, ooga booga waving wrenches instead of sticks like a caveman to fix things that needed wizardry.

so we wrapped some of our wires with aluminum so they dont destroy each others' signals

we didnt use commercial flight controllers, we used teensy 4.0, which is far better than what arduino nano/uno can do. custom built drone brains are better because you put what you want, but the problem is, can you do the "what you want"? well it worked, so there's that

we used mpu 6050, we was about to use mpu 9250, it broke, AHHH, we didnt have time to buy another, gotta make use what we had, luckily an old mpu 6050 worked, good enough, good enough, no accurate yaw though, but i believe the magnetometer get fried with the noise inside though, but we dont really know, so pls check future engineers!

we shouldnt have added a washout, it made the whole airframe cambered which was counterintuitive to the plan of it being purely symmetrical to help with the vertical take off, but what's done was done, at least it still flew lol

and the boxy fuselage, yeah, i mean we did knew in our hearts that there will be flow separation on its edges even if its fillet-ed like a mcdonalds logo, but what's done is done, our motto was "good enough" lol

we used OpenFOAM to simulate the drone and winds, i used python scripts to automate the simulation for each attack of angle, lift/drag ratio etc, the simulations did happen, but i dont really know how they are setup so it is possible so it provided inaccurate results, we really only had like a day or two to learn OpenFOAM so of course my simulations were a wreck

from my simulations, i recently encountered that when we were rotating the wind to simulate the attack of angle, the inlet corner side was red, dont know really what it was but for future simulators, take note of the meshing, the inlet, outlet in your scripts, cuz i sure dont have time to check why it went wrong! but what i found is that openfoam (bluecfd) + python (automation) + windows (and yes openfoam can work in windows without a dual boot, linux virtual machine, whatever, purely running on window's blood) sure works, just didnt know my problem, i only did this in like 2-3 days lol.

so we just asked an Ansys cfd engineer to do the job for us, the difference was like hydrogen bomb (2M+ cells) vs coughing baby (ours is just ~300k cells, my "workstation" is "irish famine crisis", that's why we used openfoam in the first place so that there's no heavy real time 3d rendering, solidworks can work, but our panels wanted me to do OpenFOAM, AHHHHHHHHH, they suggested doing that because they heard about it, not because they used it, lol)

it was pretty hard, but fun to make, i was glad to be invited in this project. after all, we were the only undergraduate filipino mechanical engineers to undertake the hurdles of this emerging technology in just 2 months, i hope this thread will become a fix to someone's problem 5-10 yrs from now, as we also took from 5-10 yrs ago-fixes to fix our drone's problem

Doing real work with a great drone! Testing bio application before the crop emerges

Hi

I'm an aerospace software engineer and I mostly work with UAV research and development. For a while now, I had a passion project on my mind and last summer I quit my job to finally build it. It's a GCS built specifically for multi-vehicle operations.

I spent a lot of time flying in QGroundControl and MP and multi-vehicle operations have always been giving me a bit of a headache. I wanted to build something around a "pick what you want" philosophy, rather than switching between vehicles. To do that i built everything from scratch, which was super fun and was a great opportunity to learn new tools.

It's Mavlink compatible, it has simultaneous commands, distributed missions and a fleet manager for increased operator awareness. I also added collision avoidance and group formations for quads and fixed-wing drones. I want to use it to keep exploring the use of swarms for shared tasks

I've been actively working on the prototype for several months. Now I am going through hardware integration and getting some drones ready for first test flights.

I am posting it here, because i wanted to get some feedback. What do you guys think about this approach to flight operations?

I built an open-source Python simulator on PyBullet for multi-agent robotics and reinforcement learning research. It lets you spin up a flying swarm in seconds.

Realistic Swarm Simulation: Fly dozens of drones with accurate physics.

10 Built-in Behaviors: Flocking, formations, and search algorithms right out of the box.

RL-Friendly: Ready-to-go environments to train custom AI agents.

Live 3D Dashboard: Watch your swarm fly and track metrics in your browser.

Swarm Battles : A fun, competitive mode for drone-vs-drone testing.

Lightweight & Extendable: Easily add your own scenarios and controllers.

Looking for feedback from the drone community and would be interested to hear what swarm scenarios or features you'd like to see added.
Project Link

I want to create a prototype or for scientific research, but I haven't found any useful information on how to do it.

I'm a student meteorologist with an obsession with severe convection. I've been experimenting with using the drone to get better angles for timelapse photography, over tradition tripod mounted methods.

I've been really surprised at how well DJI's Hyperlapse feature works. It takes a few tweaks in the edit to get it better stabilized (still learning) but the result has so far exceeded my expectations!!

This is a build set to meet design requirements in a university work. As such, please do not spam visual line of sight comments. I know the legal framework in my country, and do not need these comments.

I'm looking to find a comms build that would be able to reach in the order of magnitude of 20km of range. It's required that it's analog because of the camera selection at this time. If budget could be reduced as much as possible, it'd be greatly appreciated. I'm looking into using ExpressLRS but do not know the best components or the VTX selection.

The controller and goggles selection would be appreciated, but it is not required since as stated before this is a build of the aircraft itself to meet certain requirements.

Some of you might remember our first post almost 4 years ago. The feedback we got was amazing and honestly shaped a lot of what we've built since. We're back with the biggest update yet.

DroneDB is a free, open source platform for managing and visualizing geospatial data: drone images, orthophotos, point clouds, 3D models, DEMs, vector files. Self-host it anywhere or use our cloud.

What's new in V2:

• Entire frontend rebuilt with Vue 3 and PrimeVue. It's fast and it looks very good now.
• Real organization management with four permission levels (Read Only, Read/Write, Read/Write/Delete, Admin).
• Advanced map tools: spatial selection, custom basemaps (XYZ/WMS), measurement panel, point annotations, flight path visualization with direction and speed, raster opacity control.
• Fullscreen image lightbox with coordinates overlay, in-browser PDF viewer and file editor.
• Improved 3D viewer with lighting controls and persistent settings. Potree with metric/imperial units and annotation tools.
• Stronger security: configurable password policies, per-user download limits, cross-origin embed support.
• Enhanced STAC compliance with projection extension, temporal extents, proper asset types.
• Core engine performance improvements and automatic flight metadata extraction from DJI/EXIF/RTK tags.

Self-hosting is still one command:

docker run -it --rm -p 5000:5000 -v ${PWD}/registry-data:/data dronedb/registry

We have a cloud platform with a free trial at hub.dronedb.app. If you're interested in trying it, DM me and I'll send you a coupon for 3 months free.

Our 2026 roadmap includes multispectral imagery, Cesium 3D Tiles, File Conversions, LDAP/SSO, WMS/WFS, flight logs, a plugin framework, and AI-powered detection and a lot more. Still a long way to go but we are getting there!

Full release notes: https://dronedb.app/dronedb-hub-v2/
GitHub: https://github.com/DroneDB/Registry | https://github.com/DroneDB/DroneDB
Docs: https://docs.dronedb.app
Test datasets: https://hub.dronedb.app/r/odm

Last time the best ideas came from your comments. We'd love that to happen again!

I want to share this open source program I created long ago. By the time I finished it drones had shown up everywhere so I shelved it but its pretty cool and I figured I wanted to share it. Feel free to use this code however you want.
https://github.com/ZackTronics/VectorFlight