Messaggio di discussione

For quite some time now, I’ve had a persistent feeling in the back of my mind—one that’s becoming harder and harder to ignore the more I think about it. In the FPV drone racing world, we are relying on one of the most critical components of the entire system—the propeller—in a surprisingly non-analytical way. And the strange part is: we don’t really question it.

I’ve been involved in FPV racing for about 13 years now, and over that time I’ve seen the entire ecosystem evolve dramatically. Electronics have improved, flight controllers have become incredibly sophisticated, firmware has reached a level of refinement that would have been unthinkable years ago.

We fine-tune:

PID loops

filtering strategies

throttle curves

frame geometry

weight distribution down to the gram

We analyze logs, we tweak parameters, we iterate relentlessly.

And then we choose propellers like this:

“this one feels more aggressive”

“this one has better grip in corners”

“this one is smoother”

Which, to be clear, is not wrong. Experience matters.

Pilot perception matters. But at some point, I realized there is a missing link between:

👉 what we feel in flight

👉 and what is actually happening physically

And for anyone with even a moderately technical mindset, that gap starts to feel uncomfortable; because a propeller is not a mysterious component.

It is a very concrete, well-defined system that:

interacts with a fluid

converts electrical power into kinetic energy of air

imposes a very specific load on the motor

operates under highly dynamic conditions

Yet in practice, we often treat it like a black box.

he more I thought about it, the more obvious it became.

When we say a prop has “more grip,” what are we really describing?

When we say it’s “responsive,” what physical mechanism are we referring to?

When a prop “holds better in a corner,” what is actually happening in terms of airflow, load distribution, and transient response?

These are all valid observations—but they remain qualitative.

And that creates a hard limitation:

👉 you can’t truly design something if you can’t describe it properly

At best, you can iterate by trial and error. You can adapt, you can refine… but you’re not really controlling the process.

That’s where this project comes from.

This is not a quick experiment, and it’s definitely not something I expect to “finish” anytime soon. It’s more of a structured direction—a way to approach the problem differently.

The goal I’ve set for myself is relatively simple to state, but significantly harder to execute:

Understand how the propellers I currently use actually work

Develop a way to analyze commercial props in an objective manner

Eventually, and only at the end of that process, design a propeller from scratch with full awareness of the trade-offs

I don’t want to start by drawing a blade “by intuition.”

I want to arrive there as a consequence of understanding.

To do that, the first thing I need is a tool.

Not an academic-grade simulator filled with impractical parameters, but something much more grounded. A practical instrument that allows me to take a real propeller and answer questions like:

what does its geometry actually look like in detail?

how is the aerodynamic load distributed along the blade?

what kind of behavior should I expect from it?

In other words:

👉 I want to convert geometry into meaningful, readable information

And more importantly, I want to establish a clear relationship between:

geometry → aerodynamics → flight behavior

What I’m really after is not “perfect numbers,” but useful numbers.

If I can build a model that tells me:

“this prop will likely feel more responsive but draw more current”

or

“this one loads the outer section more, so expect stronger grip but higher rotational inertia”

then I’ve already made significant progress.

Because at that point, I’m no longer navigating blindly.

Another realization that pushed me to start this journey is fairly straightforward.

In modern FPV racing, we’ve reached a very high level of sophistication in almost every other area:

- highly refined electronics

- advanced control algorithms

- extremely precise tuning workflows

Propellers, on the other hand, feel somewhat underexplored from a user-understanding perspective.

Not because they haven’t evolved—they absolutely have—but because the tools to properly interpret them are not commonly used or available to pilots.

And that, to me, is an opportunity.

So this will be a chronicle.

Not a definitive guide, not a theoretical treatise, but a real process:

made of attempts, approximations, simplified models, corrections, and iterations.

The idea is to document, step by step:

how I analyze commercially available propellers

what kind of models I attempt to build

what works and what doesn’t

And ultimately see whether it makes sense to talk about true propeller design in this context.

If I had to summarize the end goal in the most direct way possible, it would be this:

👉 reaching a point where choosing a propeller is no longer an intuitive act, but a technical decision

And even more interesting:

👉 reaching a point where designing a propeller is not an experiment, but a logical outcome of understanding

For now, this is just the beginning.

And that’s exactly what makes it interesting.