Elodin open-sources practice rig for Anduril's $500K AI drone racing competition
By
danAtElodin
Toasted golden, schmeared with insight. Top of the rack.
Summary
Elodin Systems is open-sourcing a practice rig for Anduril's AI Grand Prix, a $500K autonomous drone racing competition. The practice rig allows contestants to write autopilot code against a working stack before the official Virtual Qualifier 1 simulator launches. The article details the journey of building Elodin, a physics simulation platform, from the founder's background in game development (working on The Sims) to creating a next-generation aerospace simulation system. The open-source practice rig runs on macOS and Linux, with setup requiring only uv sync and a 5-minute Betaflight build.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledToday we're open-sourcing a practice rig for Anduril's AI Grand Prix (a $500K autonomous drone-race competition) so contestants and anyone else curious can start writing autopilot code against a working stack now
The path here was longer than we expected. I came into this from the games side. One of my earlier jobs was working on The Sims
It's open source, runs on macOS and Linux, and the whole setup is uv sync plus a 5-minute Betaflight build
You might also wanna read
Netflix engineer's open-source tool cuts AI token usage by up to 90%
Netflix senior engineer Tejas Chopra created software called "Project Headroom" that prunes redundant tokens from AI agent instructions befo
theregister.com·4h ago
Copyparty: A Lightweight File Server That Runs as a Single Python Script
Copyparty is a lightweight, full-featured file server that runs as a single Python script, making it extremely easy to set up without needin
hackaday.com·6h ago
Researcher's "ADHD" tool for Claude Code claims 2x improvement; experts call for more evidence
Solo researcher Udit Akhouri released a third-party Agent SDK tool called "ADHD" for Claude Code on Reddit, claiming it makes the coding age
bit.ly·1d ago
ReactOS open-source Windows NT clone reaches ARM64 boot milestone on Raspberry Pi 5
ReactOS, the open-source project aiming to recreate Windows NT, has achieved a new milestone by booting on ARM64 architecture. The experimen
theregister.com·1d ago
Zig Devlog: Build System Rework Separates Maker and Configurer Processes
This devlog entry from the Zig programming language project announces a major rework of the build system, separating the maker process from
ziglang.org·1d ago
Reflections on DwarfStar 4's rapid rise in local AI inference
The author reflects on the unexpected popularity of DwarfStar 4 (DS4), a local AI inference project. They attribute its success to the conve
antirez.com·1d ago