Skip to content

Details

What if you could see every drone in your fleet, live or replayed, in glorious 3D, without spinning up a full simulator stack?
In this month's meetup, we'll dig into Hawkeye, the new lightweight real-time 3D flight visualizer for PX4. Purpose-built for SIH (PX4's Simulation-In-Hardware op sim) and ULog replay, Hawkeye ships as a single binary with a tiny asset footprint, runs on macOS, Linux, and Windows, and gets you from "drone is flying" to "I can see what it's doing" in seconds.
We'll cover what makes Hawkeye distinctive, and walk through the workflows it was built around:

  • Live SITL/SIH streaming: connect straight to PX4 and watch vehicle state come in over MAVLink, single drone or full swarm
  • ULog Replay: run a `.ulg` flight and step through it in interactive 3D with transport controls and bookmarks for jumping to the moments that matter
  • Multi-Drone Swarms: up to 16 vehicles with ghost overlays, takeoff alignment, and real-time Pearson correlation between pinned drones for spotting divergent behavior
  • Camera control: chase, FPV, and free-fly cameras, plus an orthographic side panel and fullscreen ortho view for the angle you actually need
  • Two HUD modes: Console HUD with full telemetry and annunciators for analysis, or Tactical HUD with radar panel and gimbal rings

We'll briefly touch on the architecture and why the footprint stays so small, then spend most of the time on the workflows: how to review a flight, how to stream a live one, how transport and bookmarks work, and how to drive the cameras.

You may also like