Dev fits a fly's 100,000-neuron brain into a $15 MCU to pilot micro-drones, open-sourced
alvelda · x · 2026-09-18
Developer Frankweb33 spent a week squeezing a fly-brain-inspired control system onto a $15 MCU, claiming optical flow and collision avoidance at the scale of 100,000 biological neurons can replace 70% of modern edge-robotics control stacks.
- The neural bridge works: camera input drives activity across eight virtual neural populations, which becomes left/right motor commands
- IMU data feeds movement back into the model, with smoothing, speed limits, and a 500ms watchdog built in
- Synthetic demo runs locally; ESP32 scaffold is ready for hardware integration
- Fully open source, MIT licensed
Caveat: the project also launched a memecoin token claimed to become an input signal for the physical robot — the crypto side reads as marketing and should be separated from the technical work.
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