← INDEX
NO. 05 · REVERSE ENGINEERINGRESEARCH · --:-- EDT

Open-Drone.

Fifteen-plus retail drone brands ship the same chipset and the same phone-home app. This project takes the protocol apart so the drone can fly without it.

Open Drone concept site hero
PROBLEM
The stock app for these drones talks to the aircraft in cleartext over local WiFi and uploads flight tracks to overseas servers. Owners have no open client.
APPROACH
Passive packet capture during real flights, decompiling the vendor APK, and correlating both against control inputs to map the wire format.
STATUS
The protocol envelope is fully decoded and documented. Payload byte-mapping is in progress. A Swift package skeleton and an iOS client scaffold exist for the eventual open client.
DESIGN
The screens below are from a concept site designed for the future open client, covering the cockpit interface and the privacy stance. They describe the destination, not the current state.
STACK
Python, Wireshark, jadx, apktool, Swift.
CONCEPT SITE