Get the next build.
One email when a build ships: the video, the code, the wiring, and what broke.
Journal
Build log
Day by day, from the logs. Including the days that went wrong.
- 4 November 2026
Seventeen logs and a metre and a half
Turns worked on some flights and were ignored on others, with no pattern I could see from the ground. The pattern was in the flight controller's logs, and it was seven centimetres wide.
- 26 October 2026
The nose and the switch
Sideways moves swung the camera, a fix for that made it worse, and the log showed a voice order taking control back from the transmitter 0.4 seconds after I selected Land. Two of those are fixed. The third was the design.
- 24 October 2026
The twelve-second takeoff
Two sessions on a second laptop. Orders went out in a tenth of a second, moves still waited twelve. The cause was in my executor, not the voice. Plus a camera stream that died by phone design and a GPS that stayed red.
- 22 October 2026
Flying with a dead screen
The laptop's display died. Hawk flew anyway, driven from a phone over SSH, after a macOS microphone rule that cost most of the day. Then the latency turned out to be somewhere I had not looked.
- 19 October 2026
The barometer was honest all along
Five flights, two overrides, one slow sink to the ground that nobody commanded. The estimator was still trusting a GPS altitude that wandered by metres, and one bitmask fixed it.
- 14 October 2026
Building the hub
A site to put the builds on, a plan for recording the first real session, and the two parameter changes that have to happen before the aircraft flies with Hawk again.
- 13 October 2026
The day it climbed
The first voice takeoff on the real aircraft worked. Then, a metre off the ground on the way down, it climbed, and I hit kill. The flight log says why, and the why was in my code.
- 11 October 2026
Eyes, and a first handshake with the real aircraft
Hawk got a camera, a detector and a look tool. The Action 4 streamed into the Mac over WiFi on the first try. Then the telemetry radio met the real aircraft, and the numbers started telling a different story.
- 10 October 2026
Hawk learns to talk
Voice in, voice out. The pilot got a name, a personality, a local speech pipeline, and then a long day of making it fast enough and honest enough to show someone.
- 7 October 2026
A drone that cannot crash
Before any of this touched a real aircraft, I needed one I could crash a hundred times. Getting PX4 and Gazebo running on a Mac was the first day's work, and the decision that shaped everything after.