Blue marble is essentially an open source Google Earth desktop application. Idk if it’s exactly what you want but it’s not terrible.

OsmAnd is the same thing for Android and iOS and it’s absolutely wonderful.

That’s kinda what SAR sats do. They’re using radio waves but they illuminate swaths of the planet with a big dish/array and then look at the reflections. LIDAR sats too.

Context?

Yeah the FPV community is way better because they actually have to know what they’re doing mostly. They’re mildly noncompliant but only regarding the regs that shouldn’t apply to the size of stuff they fly; RID, registration, and BVLOS don’t make sense for airframes lighter than a goose. They tend to avoid other people because they understand the public is wary of drones and they’re wary of Karens and untrained cops. They put far more hours on their airframes than any of the other amateur operators but every single time I’ve been near a drone doing something dangerous, stupid, or annoying it was a DJI.

IDK, most of the kits require soldering (because the industry is fundamentally braindead) and if you go look at the various online communities, you’ll quickly see that this is one hell of a filter.

I always love seeing these, I had my own not to long ago. Props to you for keeping it to one paragraph though, they’re usually…much longer.

If you want to play true Scotsman, the embedded devs like to make fun of the web devs for being scared of bitfields and refusing to do logic with anything other than string matching and manipulation.

. . .

Secretly it’s partially because we’re absolutely terrified of strings in any form and simply refuse to use them.

There are a lot of sub disciplines to the field, some benefit a lot from GPT or blindly copying from SA, some don’t, but that’s ok either way. Keep your skill sets broad and you’ll survive.

I used to do some work with Qualcomm and ARM IP. They both need to die. ARM is holding back all manner of technologies with their absolutely insane and byzantine licensing scheme and Qualcomm is one of the most evil tech companies in existence, you just don’t hear about them because their particular evil is constrained to B2B interactions.

Those words sound cool and mean literally nothing

Yeah, a surprising number of people don’t want these hyper complex cars with thousands of microchips and millions of lines of code operating them. Give me an electric 2012 Honda fit/Toyota matrix equivalent that just fucking works and costs $20k or less new.