Why I built a drone news aggregator instead of a build log

The original plan for Quadcopter Garage 2026 was a 52-week build log of an autonomous quadcopter project. It still might be — but right now, the higher-value thing to build is a daily drone news site.

The realization

I have a full-time job, a side business, a fitness routine, and limited evening hours. The realistic bandwidth for side projects is about 5 hours a week. A long-form build log demands more than that — you can’t fake the build footage, the tuning logs, the screenshots of the GCS. So instead of producing a half-finished build log, the better move is:

• Build something that generates its own content (the daily digest)
• Plus one editorial piece per week on the most interesting story of the week’s newsfeed

What the digest looks like

Every morning at 6am PDT, a script pulls RSS feeds from:

• Defense: The Drive War Zone, Defense News, Breaking Defense
• Drone industry: DroneDJ, sUAS News
• Research: arxiv cs.RO, arxiv cs.CV (filtered for drone-related papers)
• Community: r/drones, r/diydrones, r/Multicopter, r/robotics, r/ROS

Each item is summarized and classified into one of four buckets:

1. Defense — drone warfare, contracts, capabilities
2. DIY / Engineering — PX4/ROS2 news, hardware, community builds
3. Research — arxiv papers
4. Quick Hits — one-liners for things that don’t need a paragraph

The digest is committed to the repo, auto-deployed to Cloudflare Pages, and shows up at /digest/[date]. The homepage shows the latest one.

What the editorial looks like

Once a week I’ll pick the most interesting story from that week’s digests and write 800-1500 words on why it matters. Sometimes it’s a defense contract. Sometimes it’s a research paper that changes the technical landscape. Sometimes it’s a PX4 release that quietly shifts the autonomy stack. The cadence is slow but the quality should be higher than what a daily newsletter can offer.

What this isn’t

This is not a return to the original Quadcopter Garage. The 2013-2016 era was a hobbyist blog about hobbyist builds. This era is a news aggregator. The name stays because the domain stays, but the framing changes.

If you want the build log content, it might come back later this year — once I’ve gotten the news pipeline stable and have leftover bandwidth. If you want the news site, you’re in the right place.

How to follow

The newsletter is the main channel. One email per morning with the digest, plus the weekly editorial. Subscribe at /subscribe. Or just bookmark /digest if you’d rather read on the site.

— Shane