A long-range UAV build, one questionable decision at a time
Project Hydaspes is my attempt to build a serious long-range fixed-wing UAV while documenting the messy, technical, and occasionally humbling reality of doing it properly.
This isn’t a cinematic FPV build or a plug-and-play kit review. It’s a ground-up systems exercise: flight controllers, power domains, digital video, telemetry protocols, RF trade-offs, noise, grounding, and all the invisible decisions that determine whether something flies reliably or fails in silence.
Along the way, I’ve bricked boards, misdiagnosed firmware issues, trusted the wrong documentation, and learned more about UARTs, bootloaders, and power modules than I planned to. That’s kind of the point. Every mistake sharpens the mental model, and every subsystem gets treated like it might one day be the reason the aircraft doesn’t come home.
Hydaspes is where history, engineering curiosity, and modern avionics collide — minus the elephants, plus a lot more JST connectors.
Documenting the parts you don’t see in flight videos.
Project Hydaspes 