After my last drone flew off never to be seen again I started looking into open source flight controllers. The open source platform has come a long way. I consider DJI to be the most advanced at FC firmware. But they intentionally limit you so much.
My next drones will most likely be a Spark for the interior and an easily upgradable OSS DIY rig for aerial photography. Running Betaflight or iNav.
I'd be interested to hear how the OSS community handle flyaway events. Every commercial drone has them, but they're tricky to code round being edge cases where the evidence has, well, flown away.
> Every commercial drone has them, but they're tricky to code round being edge cases where the evidence has, well, flown away.
I wonder, given how ultra small batteries and RF chipsets have become, if this would be a viable option: take a small battery, flash memory, a GPRS modem, a GPS receiver and something like the ESP32. Make a black box out of it by encasing it in epoxy to harden it against impact. Connect it via a data bus to the drone's main controller. When the power gets cut or the data stream from the main controller is interrupted or an accelerometer detects a hard landing, power up the GPS module and have it send the current location via SMS to the owner, and also use the ESP32's wifi capability to create an access point - which can then be triangulated using a simple mapper software on your cellphone that measures wifi strength.
On low price/toy grade quads, it is usually because they get out of range of the transmitter so you can't tell them to stop. If you check out some reviews on YouTube, you'll see the reviewer throttle up the quad and turn off the receiver to see how it deals with losing connection. I don't know enough about pricier drones to comment on why they would fly away - software glitch?
My next drones will most likely be a Spark for the interior and an easily upgradable OSS DIY rig for aerial photography. Running Betaflight or iNav.