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Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

karolina.mgdubiel.com

21–30 of 98 posts

Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

#21
post #9

If I were to get a dirt cheap Chinese drone, would that be more likely to use RL or MCP? What’s the “standard”?

PID is more than enough to keep level. FPV relies on manual flight, but you can get Ardupilot for autonomous missions. There's no need for RL, nothing to gain here; level flight and following waypoints is a solved issue already.

And frankly as a pilot, I'd rather not see any completely autonomous drones with no oversight in the sky - that's one incident away in which blame cannot be put solely on the operator from getting the hobby completely banned.

Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

#22
post #3

Nit pick: The name "octocopter" does not make sense. "Helicopter" is a compound word made of "helico-" and "pter", which means "screw-wings". "Octo-" means eight, "-co-" means nothing. "Octopter" would be a correct compound word meaning "8-wings", but that would be ambiguous, so the object discussed in TFA is better named just "8-propeller drone".

I guess it's a play on the popular word "quadcopter", rather than "helicopter".

Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

#23

Hm making an AI assisted page and replacing the emdashes with double dashes seems like more work than to just rewrite the text yourself. Not sure why you would do that.

What? That’s a simple find and replace vs rewriting the whole thing. If someone had the savvy to write the thing, they probably wouldn't have been using the the assistant in the first place. Either way, comparing a find/replace to rewriting is farcical

Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

#24
post #21
post #9

If I were to get a dirt cheap Chinese drone, would that be more likely to use RL or MCP? What’s the “standard”?

PID is more than enough to keep level. FPV relies on manual flight, but you can get Ardupilot for autonomous missions. There's no need for RL, nothing to gain here; level flight and following waypoints is a solved issue already. And frankly as a pilot, I'd rather not see any completely autonomous drones with no oversight in the sky - that's one incident away in which blame cannot be put solely on the operator from ge…

Interesting - thanks! OP's drone IS using RL and that's what jumped out at me - it felt a bit overkill for the usecase.

Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

#25

Hm making an AI assisted page and replacing the emdashes with double dashes seems like more work than to just rewrite the text yourself. Not sure why you would do that.

The abstract certainly smells like 100% LLM-generated text.

Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

#27
post #6
post #3

Nit pick: The name "octocopter" does not make sense. "Helicopter" is a compound word made of "helico-" and "pter", which means "screw-wings". "Octo-" means eight, "-co-" means nothing. "Octopter" would be a correct compound word meaning "8-wings", but that would be ambiguous, so the object discussed in TFA is better named just "8-propeller drone".

Counterpoint: -copter is a perfectly cromulent suffix. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-copter gyrocopter, helicopter, quadcopter, hexacopter, octocopter, parcelcopter, and—most famously— roflcopter, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/roflcopter#/media/File:Roflco... They all have their own dictionary entries. Octocopter makes perfect sense. Everyone understands immediately what it means, and that's the only purpose of la…

Great examples. The English lexicon is continuously embiggened by the adoption and expansion of terms.

Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

#28
You know you're doing a great job, OP, when the peanut gallery here has nothing more substantial to add than to critique your em-dashes; greek-latin root word mix-ups despite the common vernacular having moved on from that; and lack of title brevity.

Congratulations --- this is a super cool project. I wonder if you've considered using ultralight filaments and 3dprinting the frame? PLA is stiff but brittle, and I know Bambu and a few others sell specialised versions that supposedly weigh less than normal.

Re: Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience

#29
post #3

Nit pick: The name "octocopter" does not make sense. "Helicopter" is a compound word made of "helico-" and "pter", which means "screw-wings". "Octo-" means eight, "-co-" means nothing. "Octopter" would be a correct compound word meaning "8-wings", but that would be ambiguous, so the object discussed in TFA is better named just "8-propeller drone".

McDonald’s getting a strongly worded letter from the Mayor of Hamburg over their use of “cheeseburger”.
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