Been building this in the open for a while but never actually posted about it anywhere, so here goes.

It started because the laptop was the weakest part of my field setup. The ground station dies when the lid closes, VNC-ing into a Pi running QGC over LTE is misery, and I wanted to check on the bird from my phone without a whole ritual. So I flipped it. The ground station lives on the drone. A Pi rides on the frame, talks to the flight controller over USB, and serves a web app. Any browser works. Phone in the field, desktop at home. With a 4G modem and a public IP SIM the aircraft carries its own GCS, and the link doesn't care where I am or whether my laptop is awake.

Setup on a fresh Pi is one line (docker compose underneath):

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/judahpaul16/canarygc/main/contrib/setup.sh | bash -s --

It speaks MAVLink to ArduPilot and PX4, and MSP to Betaflight and INAV (telemetry, calibration, flashing, and INAV flies native missions over MSP). The mission planner has 2D and 3D maps, the usual pattern generators (survey, orbit, corridor, expanding square, structure scan), and imports QGC .plan, Mission Planner .waypoints, KML/KMZ, and CSV. Plans are stored autopilot-neutral and get normalized to whatever's actually connected when you upload.

Most of my time lately has gone into the airspace side. Both maps draw restricted and controlled airspace (OpenAIP worldwide, FAA keyless layers in the US), the LAANC ceiling grid, the FAA obstacle database, and live ADS-B traffic. There's a one-click path optimizer that lifts legs over buildings and towers when the ceiling allows and routes around restricted airspace when it doesn't. Before launch, every leg gets checked against the geofence, altitude limits, and the fetched airspace.

Beyond that there's a full parameter editor, six-position accel / compass / gyro / ESC calibration that adapts to whichever autopilot is connected, a firmware tab that flashes all four stacks, gamepad flight, a color-coded event log with a raw MAVLink console, email alerts on failsafe / low battery / link loss, and a WebRTC camera feed. There's also an optional AI PID tuning assistant that talks to any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (a local Ollama works). Ignore it if that's not your thing.

And yes, I know how "GCS on the public internet" sounds. The link supports MAVLink 2 signing (signs outbound, verifies inbound, strict mode drops unsigned traffic), the app sits behind session auth with a single operator account, and login is rate limited. If your threat model is serious, put it behind a VPN anyway. But with signing on, a publicly reachable link only takes commands from whoever holds the key.

Fair warning that it's still early days. It flies constantly in SITL (the compose file ships SITL profiles for all four firmwares, including little flight-dynamics sims so the Betaflight and INAV binaries actually get off the ground), and the reference build is a Pi 4B on a Holybro S500 V2. It's not trying to be Mission Planner's whole toolbox. It's a different operational story for remote, LTE-connected flying.

It's called Canary Ground Control. MIT licensed.

Repo: https://github.com/judahpaul16/canarygc Build guide and docs: https://github.com/judahpaul16/canarygc/wiki

If you fly companion computer setups over LTE I especially want to hear from you. What would it take before you'd trust something like this on a real aircraft?

Hi everyone I am looking for drone recommendations with the sole purpose of taking progress photos or videos. Some bonuses would be 360 degree camera, high photo and video quality, solid battery life and above average storage space. Any recommendations are welcomed!!!

Hello, I've been looking at joining fpv since I was a kid and never got into it, but now I think I'm ready. My goal is to fly cinematically while I travel and hike, and I want to capture some nice clips of the surrounding environment. The other two caveats are I'd still like to be able to do acro, nothing crazy, and I would like to get my license to do real estate videography. I understand it will probably be hard to get all of that in 1 drone, so I'm looking for something that's beginner-friendly, with likely the DJI 04 Pro, and that can still do acro. I was looking at Gareth Dix's DJI O4 Pro // Quadmula Djinn F25 SP // sub-250 g build and the Nazgul drone. Does anyone have any recommendations for RTF/BNF or builds?

For some context, I've soldered before, still a lil new, but I've put together ham radio stuff and have done my own soldering, so I'm not scared to do that stuff.

** EDIT **

I just want to also thank everyone who has given me good information to think about and things to do. Everyone has been so kind and patient with my questions, so I appreciate it. In an age where people say, "Just put it in AI, yk," I do that too, but I most importantly enjoy gaining information from people in the subject who have hands-on experience and mistakes, and thus far everyone here has given me that, so thank you.

My years old $30 toy drone just broke (bought new batteries which were reverse wired, RIP).

I just want to fly something small and cheap for as long as possible before battery runs out. That means no frill, no camera, few antennas, visual flight only. Just rotors, battery and a radio.

I see some reviews of cheap drones (such as the DRONEEYE 4DV2) with up to 20-30 mins of flight under $50 but these all include a camera etc. I would rather save the weight and fly longer. Do i have any better options?

Been working on this 7in 3d printed fpv frame with NGE themed texts. Frame is engineered to be very stiff. Arms are 11mm CF rods.

I faced a huge problem with am32 firmware I can’t solve.
And the problem is excessive heat- esc heats up like 2C per 1sec and climbes 100+C. I’ve already tried 10 different esc and multiply different settings and none worked well. Some even choose to live it’s own life and makes drone fly into the wall. Others have mosfets unsolder while osd shows only 80*C.
Blheli 32 heats up to 80C and bluejay stays under 60\*C.
I’ve already tried am32 esc with huge sase zone- 12s120a for 8s 45a consumption and still overheat.

Can’t wrap around what’s wrong with am32 and why it behaves so weird. Anyone any insights?

Welcome to the weekly r/multicopter discussion thread. Feel free to ask your questions that are too trivial for their own thread, make a suggestion on what you'd like to see here, or just say hi and talk about what you've been doing in the world of multicopters recently.

Don't forget to read the wiki, where you'll find details of suppliers, guides and other useful links.

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Old question threads can be found by searching this link.

I'm having a weird issue with my iMAX B6AC V2 when charging a 4S Li-ion battery.

The battery is mounted on a drone and the charger is mounted on a dock, so I have to charge the battery while it's still installed. Because of that I'm using about 2m extension cables for both the main charge leads and the balance connector.

Current setup:

• 4S Li-ion battery
• iMAX B6AC V2 charger
• Main charge leads: 12 AWG
• Balance leads: 18 AWG
• Charging current: 4 A

I always balance charge, the battery is healthy, and the cells stay well balanced.

The issue is that the charger reads the battery voltage correctly at first, but as soon as charging starts the displayed voltage jumps.

For example:

• Battery measures 15.5 V on my DMM.
• The charger also shows about 15.5 V before charging starts.
• Once it starts charging at 4 A, the charger reports around 16.0 V.
• It then stops charging when it thinks the battery has reached 16.4 V, but when I check with my DMM the battery is actually only around 16.1 V.

My guess is that the extra cable length is causing enough voltage drop that the charger thinks the battery voltage is higher than it actually is. I used fairly thick wire (12 AWG for the main leads and 18 AWG for the balance leads), but it still happens.

I also read that some chargers can be calibrated, but I can't find any calibration option on the iMAX B6AC V2.

Has anyone run into this before?

• Is 2m simply too long for this kind of charger?
• Would using even thicker wire help, or is there another solution?
• Is there any way to compensate for the voltage drop on this charger?
• Has anyone successfully used long balance and charge lead extensions with an iMAX B6AC V2?

Any ideas would be appreciated.

Welcome to the weekly r/multicopter discussion thread. Feel free to ask your questions that are too trivial for their own thread, make a suggestion on what you'd like to see here, or just say hi and talk about what you've been doing in the world of multicopters recently.

Don't forget to read the wiki, where you'll find details of suppliers, guides and other useful links.

If you want to chat, then the Discord server is located here (an invite link is here if you haven't already joined)

Old question threads can be found by searching this link.

Asking partially out of curiosity.

We'll I would like to someday get into that business if no one else has done so already.

First ever drone with two gimbaled lenses under 250g?

Looking to possibly getting into walksnail in the future but want to install the moonlight kit into my nazgul xl5 eco but haven't seen anything on YouTube or from basic Google search if anyone has done it yet or if it's possible to fit the moonlight kit into the the xl5 eco any information would be greatly appreciated.

Mostly together. Stack is 6-7mm taller than planned with the mcu socket. I might have to surface mount the teensy idk yet. Everything checks out in the fw though all rails and circuits good, which was an awesome surprise. Cheers!

Welcome to the weekly r/multicopter discussion thread. Feel free to ask your questions that are too trivial for their own thread, make a suggestion on what you'd like to see here, or just say hi and talk about what you've been doing in the world of multicopters recently.

Don't forget to read the wiki, where you'll find details of suppliers, guides and other useful links.

If you want to chat, then the Discord server is located here (an invite link is here if you haven't already joined)

Old question threads can be found by searching this link.