June 30, 2026
Eight props, zero chill
Building a custom octocopter from scratch with no prior hardware experience
Guy builds an 8-prop drone in weeks and the comments instantly turn into a grammar war
TLDR: A first-time builder made a custom eight-motor drone fly in just weeks and now wants it to stay airborne even when motors fail. The comments split fast between impressed fans, nitpickers arguing over the word “octocopter,” and skeptics accusing the post of bragging or looking AI-made.
A maker just did the kind of thing that makes the internet yell “wait, you built THAT with zero experience?”: he designed and hand-built a custom eight-propeller drone, got it into the air in about two and a half weeks, and now wants to teach it to keep flying even after multiple motors die. The project page is full of sweaty trial-and-error, near-disasters, and a glorious first-flight clip that screams mad scientist energy. Even better, the creator openly posted the messy learning process, including bugs, crashes, and one painfully relatable self-own involving a zombie training process sabotaging results.
But the real show was the comments. One person was all wholesome support — “Will follow a fellow Polish inventor!” — while another kicked the door open with an all-time internet move: a full-on linguistic takedown of the word “octocopter.” Yes, while a homemade flying machine was learning to survive broken motors, the crowd was arguing Greek roots like it was ancient-language court. Then came the skeptics and side-eye brigade: one commenter wondered whether saying “no prior experience” was inspiration or humblebrag, and another questioned the page style itself, basically accusing it of looking AI-assisted. There was even a confused-but-funny detour from someone asking if cheap drones use “RL” or “MCP,” which perfectly captured the vibe: half amazed, half suspicious, and fully ready to nitpick everything. In other words, classic internet — one part applause, two parts chaos.
Key Points
- •The article documents a custom octocopter project built from scratch in about 2.5 weeks, from CAD design to a first flight.
- •The airframe was designed in Fusion 360, CNC-milled from G10 fiberglass and carbon fiber, and assembled by hand.
- •Two project phases are complete: frame design and assembly, and conventional flight using a standard flight controller.
- •The current focus is training a reinforcement-learning policy to maintain flight through motor failures, with simulation results showing survival through all single and dual failures and some triple failures.
- •A key debugging fix was replacing hard-clipped motor commands with tanh-squashed residual actions around hover throttle, improving untrained survival from 7 steps to 205.