@ananthsridhar.eth

Played with a toy drone recently and it was amazing to experience how easy it has become to learn to fly it. Back when I was attempting to learn to fly "RC Planes" in 2009, it was quite an expensive DIY affair with no guarantees on a successful flight. To make things worse every unsuccessful flight, for any number of reasons from poorly configured transmitter/receiver setups to little structural deviations affecting servo actuations, would often result in catastrophic damages to the system. It was a very expensive way to develop intuitions for flight dynamics. After a couple of failures amounting to a few thousand rupees, I resorted to staying only with the books and didn't particularly develop good physical intuitions. I'm astonished at how cheap and accessible it has become now. A little bit of embedded compute + cheap precision manufacturing can go a long way in hiding gnarly control problems plus giving you an illusion of control. The toy also had a "stunt" mode that will flip the drone about an axis, fully taking care of the rotor controls. Felt like a boomer discovering YouTube for the first time and looked quite silly in front of my 12 year old nephew, who mastered the flight almost instantly.

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