Some amazing engineer built a drone that can lift its own weight using only the electric power that it gets from an on-board solar panel and nothing else (no battery).
Video: I Built a Solar Powered Drone and it WORKS by Luke Maximo Bell
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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This is excellent, now pair it with a lightish battery to fill in any gaps in sun exposure and add lora and this is the start of emergency deployment of meshtastic. Imagine just tossing one of these up and it can stay up all day.
Oh and give it the ability to switch to glider mode so it can "land" without damage.
I am someone who is interested in rc planes, multirotors, and automation in general. Not an expert by any measure, but have some experience.
A hybrid quad-rotor/plane would be much better for this. They can VTOL, hover, do all the quadcopter stuff, but there's still the usual plane motors to push the whole thing forward. The wings provide tons of lift and reduce the overall power usage of the system. Have it circle above an area until you don't need the pop-up mesh network.
I've seen a few content creators like rctestflight make full solar planes, running ardupilot to fly way point missions and circle around for as long as possible.
Combining the two might reduce the overall efficiency when compared to either separately, I imagine the extra grams from the mesh radios would still allow for very long flight times.
So theoretically you should be able to toss a couple out that can circle overhead and act as super long line-of-sight relays and provide coverage over a huge area, all of which couod be deployed and packed up in minutes.
Uh no. This thing is really fragile and at the limit of what's technologically feasible. It won't survive in any real world application.
Yet.
Sure. Technology moves on. This sort of thing may well be commonplace in a few years.
yeah it's really really fragile. they show it in the video, one of the panels broke because a cat stepped on it. obviously not very suited for real-world deployment.
however i do wonder why they use polycrystalline silicon and not just amorphous silicon? I mean 20% efficiency instead of 8% makes a difference but i did some rough maths and it could still work with amorphous silicon if you use the area on the drone better. But amorphous silicon has the advantage of making a very thin and flexible layer that doesn't break easily. It's essentially more like a flexible piece of cloth instead of a solid object. Maybe worth a consideration.
It's still fun to think about this stuff, maybe just maybe it will be feasible in far future.
I wonder if you'd find this video interesting: RC Solar Plane Flight Duration Test
:o yeah indeed