The name "octocopter" does not make sense. "Helicopter" is a compound word made of "helico-" and "pter", which means "screw-wings". "Octo-" means eight, "-co-" means nothing.
"Octopter" would be a correct compound word meaning "8-wings", but that would be ambiguous, so the object discussed in TFA is better named just "8-propeller drone".
Nit pick: "nit pick" means to remove tiny bugs from hair, which this is not.
Oh, language changes and now "nit pick" means "to make trivial criticisms" even though neither "nit" nor "pick" etymologically has anything to do with criticisms? How very self-serving of you ;)
cyclopeanutopia · 2026-06-30 11:11:01 UTC
Unrelated.
ShinyLeftPad · 2026-06-30 13:14:51 UTC
It's a metaphor:)
ButlerianJihad · 2026-06-30 11:03:18 UTC
Are you trying to say that it’s been co-opted? Did anyone consult the Egyptian Christian community about this?
Octocopter makes perfect sense. Everyone understands immediately what it means, and that's the only purpose of language: to convey ideas. It should be clear, which this is, and concise, which this is.
Fidelity to ancient Greek is not, and should not, be a goal for English.
_kb · 2026-06-30 12:09:54 UTC
Great examples. The English lexicon is continuously embiggened by the adoption and expansion of terms.
Closi · 2026-06-30 11:04:09 UTC
Blame language evolving over time rather than OP, octocopter is a widely-used term for '8 propellor drones'.
A nit pick with your post - you use the word 'ambiguous' but really this is from the latin root 'ambiguus' so we don't need the supurflous 'o' in between the two u's.
afandian · 2026-06-30 11:08:34 UTC
Well I was confused by it! I was expecting an article on amateur semiconductor fabrication. Granted, that was due to my misreading it as 'optocoupler'.
cryptopian · 2026-06-30 11:08:34 UTC
This is quite a common linguistic phonomenon, where a word is rebracketed to form a new suffix, even if it doesn't make sense with the original etymology. See also -holic (alcoholic -> workaholic), -thon (marathon -> danceathon) or -gate (Watergate -> partygate). Termed a "libfix" from liberated affix
Mtinie · 2026-06-30 11:13:11 UTC
That ship has long sailed. You’re correct, but the author isn’t the one who “named the thing” in this case, they are just using the name commonly used to describe it.
Multi-rotor drones have been called tricopters, quadcopters, hexacopters, octocopters based on their propeller counts conversationally for as long as I can remember.
There are plenty of commercial vendors who use the exact term for their expensive industrial drones.
Update: I see that in the four minutes it took for me to validate my initial inclination and post that plenty of others also had the same thought :) No need to me to belabor the point!
If I were to get a dirt cheap Chinese drone, would that be more likely to use RL or MCP? What’s the “standard”?
spaqin · 2026-06-30 11:57:13 UTC
PID is more than enough to keep level. FPV relies on manual flight, but you can get Ardupilot for autonomous missions. There's no need for RL, nothing to gain here; level flight and following waypoints is a solved issue already.
And frankly as a pilot, I'd rather not see any completely autonomous drones with no oversight in the sky - that's one incident away in which blame cannot be put solely on the operator from getting the hobby completely banned.
quibono · 2026-06-30 12:02:13 UTC
Interesting - thanks! OP's drone IS using RL and that's what jumped out at me - it felt a bit overkill for the usecase.
ramon156 · 2026-06-30 11:51:37 UTC
Hm making an AI assisted page and replacing the emdashes with double dashes seems like more work than to just rewrite the text yourself. Not sure why you would do that.
dylan604 · 2026-06-30 12:01:57 UTC
What? That’s a simple find and replace vs rewriting the whole thing. If someone had the savvy to write the thing, they probably wouldn't have been using the the assistant in the first place. Either way, comparing a find/replace to rewriting is farcical
quibono · 2026-06-30 12:04:19 UTC
The abstract certainly smells like 100% LLM-generated text.
iterateoften · 2026-06-30 13:02:58 UTC
Tbh this is cooler than anything on your github so he (edit: she) can do what he wants IMO
mathisfun123 · 2026-06-30 13:44:14 UTC
> more work than to just rewrite the text yourself
You think s/—/--/g is more work than rewriting a whole article? Is this what you're saying?
m3kw9 · 2026-06-30 12:08:13 UTC
Why not just say from scratch instead of no prior experience, is it to brag
myrmidon · 2026-06-30 12:47:30 UTC
Might be intended to preemptively deflect criticism of "reinventing the wheel"/solving subproblems in a non-standard/convoluted way.
I'd expect an engineering project with "no prior experience" to take weird/experimental approaches more often compared to a "from scratch" project (where I would expect proven minimalism instead).
mickeyp · 2026-06-30 12:35:52 UTC
You know you're doing a great job, OP, when the peanut gallery here has nothing more substantial to add than to critique your em-dashes; greek-latin root word mix-ups despite the common vernacular having moved on from that; and lack of title brevity.
Congratulations --- this is a super cool project. I wonder if you've considered using ultralight filaments and 3dprinting the frame? PLA is stiff but brittle, and I know Bambu and a few others sell specialised versions that supposedly weigh less than normal.
cwmoore · 2026-06-30 12:51:50 UTC
Yes. And when your design is simply beautiful as this is:
Most filament based printed frames end up with really nasty resonance; it’s possible to engineer damping around the issue with some clever 3D design if the parameters of the prints are measured, but overall 3D printing copter frames doesn’t tend to be a straightforward solution.
the__alchemist · 2026-06-30 13:39:21 UTC
I agree with your first point.
The milled fiberglass the author used is a much better UAS frame material than anything from a filament 3d printer due to stiffness and related considerations.
mickeyp · 2026-06-30 13:55:02 UTC
Oh no doubt. I'm no drone expert!
melagonster · 2026-06-30 12:46:15 UTC
I do not notice that the time of posts is reversed haha. I am confused whether you had build it.
Thank you, it's cool!
sanex · 2026-06-30 12:54:56 UTC
People are so jealous. This is cool as hell.
pjdkoch · 2026-06-30 12:58:18 UTC
Kudos for such a great learning journey!
TacticalCoder · 2026-06-30 14:05:44 UTC
Amazing: I'm watching lots of homemade builds atm.
I've got a question: why CNC milling and not just FDM 3D printed parts? TFA doesn't talk much about it except saying she went to a machine shop.
> 2. CNC milling forms out of G-10 fiberglass (arms) and 5mm carbon fiber (body)
TFA also says this:
> The solution for this is to 3D print a 0-tolerance assembly jig to hold the arms in perfect position while the center of the drone is superglued together.
Why not 3D print it all?
There's this guy who built a drone that can fly for 3 hours and cover hundreds of miles, 3D printed at home on a $250 printer:
Then there was the $200 K quote for the body for a car that just did Pike's Peak with a four times Pike's Peak champion and instead the team... 3D-printed the car's body at home (something like 40 parts, assembled together), which cost them less than $2 K to make (1/100th of the quoted price for the car's body). Here's the vid where they print all the parts (on a $1500 consumer printer):
Basically: why CNC milling and not 3D printing at home when many drones enthusiasts (and now too people building race cars) simply print parts at home on a consumer-grade 3D printer?
Comments
The name "octocopter" does not make sense. "Helicopter" is a compound word made of "helico-" and "pter", which means "screw-wings". "Octo-" means eight, "-co-" means nothing.
"Octopter" would be a correct compound word meaning "8-wings", but that would be ambiguous, so the object discussed in TFA is better named just "8-propeller drone".
Oh, language changes and now "nit pick" means "to make trivial criticisms" even though neither "nit" nor "pick" etymologically has anything to do with criticisms? How very self-serving of you ;)
See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helipad
gyrocopter, helicopter, quadcopter, hexacopter, octocopter, parcelcopter, and—most famously—
roflcopter, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/roflcopter#/media/File:Roflco...
They all have their own dictionary entries.
Octocopter makes perfect sense. Everyone understands immediately what it means, and that's the only purpose of language: to convey ideas. It should be clear, which this is, and concise, which this is.
Fidelity to ancient Greek is not, and should not, be a goal for English.
A nit pick with your post - you use the word 'ambiguous' but really this is from the latin root 'ambiguus' so we don't need the supurflous 'o' in between the two u's.
Multi-rotor drones have been called tricopters, quadcopters, hexacopters, octocopters based on their propeller counts conversationally for as long as I can remember.
There are plenty of commercial vendors who use the exact term for their expensive industrial drones.
Update: I see that in the four minutes it took for me to validate my initial inclination and post that plenty of others also had the same thought :) No need to me to belabor the point!
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/copter
And frankly as a pilot, I'd rather not see any completely autonomous drones with no oversight in the sky - that's one incident away in which blame cannot be put solely on the operator from getting the hobby completely banned.
You think s/—/--/g is more work than rewriting a whole article? Is this what you're saying?
I'd expect an engineering project with "no prior experience" to take weird/experimental approaches more often compared to a "from scratch" project (where I would expect proven minimalism instead).
Congratulations --- this is a super cool project. I wonder if you've considered using ultralight filaments and 3dprinting the frame? PLA is stiff but brittle, and I know Bambu and a few others sell specialised versions that supposedly weigh less than normal.
https://karolina.mgdubiel.com/drone/drone-img/05-30-26/cnc_c...
The milled fiberglass the author used is a much better UAS frame material than anything from a filament 3d printer due to stiffness and related considerations.
Thank you, it's cool!
I've got a question: why CNC milling and not just FDM 3D printed parts? TFA doesn't talk much about it except saying she went to a machine shop.
> 2. CNC milling forms out of G-10 fiberglass (arms) and 5mm carbon fiber (body)
TFA also says this:
> The solution for this is to 3D print a 0-tolerance assembly jig to hold the arms in perfect position while the center of the drone is superglued together.
Why not 3D print it all?
There's this guy who built a drone that can fly for 3 hours and cover hundreds of miles, 3D printed at home on a $250 printer:
https://youtu.be/e7AIKGDrlgs
Then there was the $200 K quote for the body for a car that just did Pike's Peak with a four times Pike's Peak champion and instead the team... 3D-printed the car's body at home (something like 40 parts, assembled together), which cost them less than $2 K to make (1/100th of the quoted price for the car's body). Here's the vid where they print all the parts (on a $1500 consumer printer):
https://youtu.be/nt85nTMnY1w
Basically: why CNC milling and not 3D printing at home when many drones enthusiasts (and now too people building race cars) simply print parts at home on a consumer-grade 3D printer?