I Tried Building a Cheap Indoor Positioning System… So I Built a Drone Instead

Hey everyone — Cifer here This project started as a simple experiment, the kind where you just want to test an idea quickly and see if it works, but somewhere along the way it turned into a full system involving RF tracking, real-time visualization, custom hardware, and eventually… a drone. The original goal was straightforward: Build one of the cheapest indoor localization systems possible using ESP32. No expensive modules. No complex setups. Just signal strength… and curiosity. It worked. But not in the way I expected. The Idea — Indoor Positioning Without GPS Indoor positioning is one of those problems that looks easy until you actually try to solve it, because the moment GPS drops out, you’re forced to rely on indirect measurements that are often noisy, inconsistent, and heavily dependent on the environment. Instead of going for high-end solutions like UWB or vision tracking, I decided to start with something minimal: BLE RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) At a high level,…