SUNSET R&DResearch & Development
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● Technology

Industrial parts. One instrument.

Commodity compute, an open flight stack and a desktop printer, integrated tightly enough to behave like one instrument. Every layer is documented, versioned and verified against source.

Layers 6Compute Pi 5 + Hailo-8LFlight ArduPilot 4.6.3
01 The stack

Six layers, each verified.

L1

Airframe

Parametric OpenSCAD, one file per printable part. Manifold, flat-bottom, inside a 256 mm Bambu A1 bed; joinery where a part would not fit. Locked motor pad: 16 × 16 mm M3, 8 mm bore.

PLA · PETG
L2

Propulsion & power

2300 KV motors on 5″ props, 4S 14.8 V packs with per-cell monitoring, 3S bench pack for first hover. Voltage/current telemetry into the flight controller and the fleet monitor.

4S · 35C
L3

Flight control

Pixhawk 6C running ArduPilot Copter 4.6.3. Parameter files gate-verified against the tagged source: ranges, bitmasks, battery thresholds, E-stop and failsafe behaviour.

ArduPilot
L4

Companion & perception

Raspberry Pi 5 with a Hailo-8L accelerator (13 TOPS). Motion gate → classifier → detection events. MAVLink Guided-mode commands from the companion, with the vehicle's own system id so failsafes stay intact.

Pi 5 · Hailo-8L
L5

Aux sensors

ESP32 nodes for ranging, PIR and pack telemetry on a documented wire protocol. 3.3 V logic throughout; level-shifted where a 5 V part is unavoidable.

ESP32
L6

Fleet monitor

Every airframe posts telemetry and detections over an authenticated link to the operator console: battery, position, thermals, inference rate, health probes and a full audit trail.

Live
02 System map

How the pieces talk to each other.

Sunset R&D system schematic Camera Module 3 sends frames over CSI to a Raspberry Pi 5, which runs inference on a Hailo-8L over PCIe, receives aux sensor data from an ESP32 over UART, commands a Pixhawk 6C flight controller over MAVLink, and sends detection events over HTTPS to the operator console. No video leaves the aircraft. CSI · frames PCIe · inference UART 115200 · aux data MAVLink · Guided ESC signals HTTPS · events only SENSOR Camera Module 3 AUX SENSORS ESP32 node COMPANION Raspberry Pi 5 ACCELERATOR Hailo-8L FLIGHT Pixhawk 6C PROPULSION ESCs · motors GROUND Operator console
System Hover or focus a component

Every link is a real interface in the Test #1 build. Detection events travel to the console; video never leaves the aircraft.

Harrier hexacopter CAD render
03 Edge inference

Latency you can fly on.

Inference runs on the aircraft at roughly 28 frames per second. No uplink is required for the drone to perceive: no cloud dependency, no video leaving the airframe, and a telemetry stream small enough for a long-range radio.

13
TOPS on board
28
Frames / second
3
Object classes
04 Method

Verified, not assumed.

GATE / CAD

Every STL is gated

Manifold check, flat-bottom check, bed-fit check on every render. A part that fails does not ship, and a script's claim is never taken as evidence.

GATE / FLIGHT

Parameters against source

Flight parameters are validated against the tagged ArduPilot source tree, not the wiki. Three invalid lines were caught this way before the first hover.

GATE / BENCH

Bench before air

A nine-stage bench sequence on a small 3S pack, including E-stop, radio and GCS failsafe tests, before any airframe leaves the ground.