Manil Ferr

[Manil Ferr @ManilFerr]

I built and open-sourced a flying drone from scratch in my university dorm during first-year engineering.

Not assembled. Built. Everything. Including firmware.

I designed the frame, 3D printed the body, wired the electronics, and wrote the flight firmware from zero.

[Rishi Shah @Rishi_Shah99]

I took OSDN, a brand-new linear-attention model that learns to tune its own memory updates as it reads (think AdaGrad for the architectures trying to replace the transformer), rebuilt it from scratch in pure C++ with my own autograd engine, and ran it on a $4 microcontroller to predict hypoglycemia 60 minutes before it hits.
No PyTorch. No JAX. No TensorFlow. No ML library at all. Straight C++ standard library.

[Rishi Shah @Rishi_Shah99]

It runs on an ESP32-S3 in 20% of its RAM.And the deploy kernel is proven: three independent implementations of the math agree to 8 decimal places, checked on every commit. Next step is leave-one-patient-out cross-validation. https://t.co/KdNxz34tFG

[Manil Ferr @ManilFerr]

@CaptVenk I will 🫡.

[Manil Ferr @ManilFerr]

I built and open-sourced a flying drone from scratch in my university dorm during first-year engineering.

Not assembled. Built. Everything. Including firmware.

I designed the frame, 3D printed the body, wired the electronics, and wrote the flight firmware from zero.

[Manil Ferr @ManilFerr]

@ZaidsJourney Thank you Zaid! I appreciate it.

[Manil Ferr @ManilFerr]

@andrewarruda Appreciate it, man. Would be a waste not to turn it into a startup.

[Manil Ferr @ManilFerr]

Also, a big thanks to @Rishi_Shah99 for helping me track down and debug some of the nastier bugs along the way.

[Manil Ferr @ManilFerr]

The hard part wasn’t making the motors spin. It was building the flight stack: sensor fusion, PID control, motor mixing, wireless communication, telemetry, calibration, and enough tuning to make it actually fly.