DroneDB VS dRehmFlight

There is DroneDB, it's open source project, and you can self-host, or open up projects locally for free. I also believe it has a cloud service that has a few Gb free, but for bigger projects you would have to buy it. It's pretty ok from my experience, but I'm not sure if you can have annotations, I believe it uses similar libraries as WebODM.

For simply sharing a 3d model you could use Sketchfab or DroneDB.

DroneDB is a self-hosted application that can do that https://dronedb.app/

Easy hosting of data is totally Drone Deploy's upside, but again the cost/economics of DD was a hard pill for me to swallow. I am very excited about DroneDB: https://dronedb.app/ because it looks like it will fill the sharing void at a much cheaper price point. The interface is not as shiny as DroneDeploy but I love that they offer a "we host" or "you host" option and you can go between the two - that's great for scaling operations if you plan to seriously grow your drone program.

you can host and share your ortho on our platform https://project-kiwi.org/ or i’d also recommend drone db! https://dronedb.app/

It would have been nice if you'd given us the actual GitHub link. When I Googled DroneDB Hub I found the page for the business and it wasn't even clear to me if it was open source or not.

It's in our roadmap: https://github.com/DroneDB/DroneDB/issues/12 so stay tuned!

They mention DroneDB: https://dronedb.app/

You can try the free online hub on DroneDB: https://dronedb.app It's an open source database for geospatial data and much more.

Since you mentioned programming, one other thing you should consider is the firmware. FPV drones typically run the betaflight firmware. betaflight is fairly mature, feature-rich and is aimed at racers and freestyle pilots. If you’re looking more to tinker with programing, you could start with this instead of a more standard flight controller: https://github.com/nickrehm/dRehmFlight

I have similar aspirations. No books, but if you want an example of someone who’s done that before, check out drhemflight. It’s not fully autonomous, but it’s a modular flight stabilizer running on teensy, which uses arduino IDE

There's several flight control systems on Github, such as Ardupilot, for example. I wouldn't undertake this without checking out what's already out there, all the way down to simple stabilization systems.

To add to this, most of the time one doesn't need to hack on the drone firmware itself. Just configuring/hacking the mission planner alone would go a long way: https://ardupilot.org/planner/

But if you're interested in more readable codebases without too much legacy headaches:

https://github.com/BossHobby/QUICKSILVER (for indoor drones mostly)

And for even less functionality but a good learning tool kind of codebase:

https://github.com/nickrehm/dRehmFlight

dRehmFlight is about the simplest a flight controller can get (in terms of code readability).

This is actually my own flight controller code running on a teensy 4.0 microcontroller, coded in arduino: https://github.com/nickrehm/dRehmFlight