Third installment... There is a sentence guaranteed to irritate at least a few people in the open-source drone community: Modern drones became better aircraft when they outgrew Arduino. Before somebody reaches for the keyboard, that is not an argument that Arduino failed. It is almost exactly the opposite. Arduino succeeded so spectacularly at opening electronics, programming, and autonomous systems to ordinary builders that the people it empowered eventually demanded more th

A few months ago I published a short piece claiming Arduino basically launched the drone revolution. It lit up the comments — including a sharp, fair correction from someone who was building experimental UAV hardware back in the 1990s. His point landed: drone technology didn’t begin with a little blue board on a hobbyist workbench. Long before Arduino existed, serious engineers in research labs, defense programs, and aerospace shops were already flying autopilots, testing em