#control

We had logged the flight controller on the bench before — but always down a USB cable, which is exactly what kept it pinned to the bench. A new UDP/WiFi telemetry bridge cut that cable and let the airframe move freely on a rig for the first time. This is a frame-by-frame read of that first untethered log: the transport, an attitude loop that shakes itself apart under its own feedback, and the sensors and telemetry bugs underneath.

We built a closed-loop PID autotuner that flies its own experiments in simulation and searches the gain space — eight optimizers, a chatter-aware cost, and two failure modes that looked solved but weren't. A deep dive into the system, the algorithms, and the fixes.