9 comments

  • mickeyp 35 minutes ago
    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.

  • pjdkoch 12 minutes ago
    Kudos for such a great learning journey!
  • sanex 16 minutes ago
    People are so jealous. This is cool as hell.
  • melagonster 24 minutes ago
    I do not notice that the time of posts is reversed haha. I am confused whether you had build it.

    Thank you, it's cool!

  • ramon156 1 hour ago
    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.
    • iterateoften 8 minutes ago
      Tbh this is cooler than anything on your github so he can do what he wants IMO
    • quibono 1 hour ago
      The abstract certainly smells like 100% LLM-generated text.
    • dylan604 1 hour ago
      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
  • cyclopeanutopia 2 hours ago
    Will follow a fellow Polish inventor! :)
  • quibono 2 hours ago
    If I were to get a dirt cheap Chinese drone, would that be more likely to use RL or MCP? What’s the “standard”?
    • spaqin 1 hour ago
      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.

      • quibono 1 hour ago
        Interesting - thanks! OP's drone IS using RL and that's what jumped out at me - it felt a bit overkill for the usecase.
  • adrian_b 2 hours ago
    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".

    • Mtinie 1 hour ago
      That ship has long sailed. You’re correct, but the author isn’t the one who “named the thing” in this case, they are just using the name commonly used to describe it.

      Multi-rotor drones have been called tricopters, quadcopters, hexacopters, octocopters based on their propeller counts conversationally for as long as I can remember.

      There are plenty of commercial vendors who use the exact term for their expensive industrial drones.

      Update: I see that in the four minutes it took for me to validate my initial inclination and post that plenty of others also had the same thought :) No need to me to belabor the point!

    • ChrisKnott 29 minutes ago
      McDonald’s getting a strongly worded letter from the Mayor of Hamburg over their use of “cheeseburger”.
    • maciuz 2 hours ago
      The -copter suffix is very common in the drone community.eg quadcopter is widely accepted https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadcopter
    • cryptopian 2 hours ago
      This is quite a common linguistic phonomenon, where a word is rebracketed to form a new suffix, even if it doesn't make sense with the original etymology. See also -holic (alcoholic -> workaholic), -thon (marathon -> danceathon) or -gate (Watergate -> partygate). Termed a "libfix" from liberated affix
    • Closi 2 hours ago
      Blame language evolving over time rather than OP, octocopter is a widely-used term for '8 propellor drones'.

      A nit pick with your post - you use the word 'ambiguous' but really this is from the latin root 'ambiguus' so we don't need the supurflous 'o' in between the two u's.

      • afandian 2 hours ago
        Well I was confused by it! I was expecting an article on amateur semiconductor fabrication. Granted, that was due to my misreading it as 'optocoupler'.
    • HPsquared 1 hour ago
      "Copter" is a known word, short for helicopter.

      https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/copter

      • mapt 1 hour ago
        On a related note, pronunciation variance in "Helicopter" -> "Helacopter" -> "Helocopter" leads to a confusing abbreviation - "Helee" vs "Heelo"
    • GordonS 1 hour ago
      I guess it's a play on the popular word "quadcopter", rather than "helicopter".
    • KPGv2 2 hours ago
      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 language: to convey ideas. It should be clear, which this is, and concise, which this is.

      Fidelity to ancient Greek is not, and should not, be a goal for English.

      • _kb 1 hour ago
        Great examples. The English lexicon is continuously embiggened by the adoption and expansion of terms.
  • m3kw9 1 hour ago
    Why not just say from scratch instead of no prior experience, is it to brag
    • myrmidon 23 minutes ago
      Might be intended to preemptively deflect criticism of "reinventing the wheel"/solving subproblems in a non-standard/convoluted way.

      I'd expect an engineering project with "no prior experience" to take weird/experimental approaches more often compared to a "from scratch" project (where I would expect proven minimalism instead).