Upside Down Labs, the open-source biosensing company, built a real-time brain-computer interface that flies a Ryze Tello using signals read straight off the human body.
The system pulls EEG brain activity, EMG muscle activity, and EOG eye movement through the company’s Neuro PlayGround Lite board, converts them into flight commands, and sends them to the drone over Wi-Fi. Every part of the build is open hardware and open software, documented for anyone to replicate.
The drone never touches a traditional controller. A pilot wearing electrodes flexes an arm or moves an eye, and the Tello responds. It is a research demo, not a product, but it runs on parts that cost less than a mid-range DJI battery.
The Build Runs On A Cheap Open-Source Biosensor Stack
As reported by Hackster.Io, the core of the system is the BioAmp EXG Pill, a biopotential signal board that measures 25.4 by 10.0 mm (1.0 by 0.4 in). That single board reads electrical activity from the body cleanly enough to work right next to AC mains noise, which is the part most cheap sensors get wrong.
The Pill ships configured for EEG and EOG by default. Recording clean EMG or ECG takes a deliberate hardware step: the builder closes a solder joint on the board to reconfigure the front end. That detail tells you this is a maker’s tool, not a sealed consumer gadget. It pairs with almost any microcontroller that has an analog input, including the Arduino Nano and the Raspberry Pi Pico.
In this build the Pill feeds the Neuro PlayGround Lite, the company’s microcontroller board made for biosignal experiments. The NPG Lite handles acquisition and processing, then pushes the resulting commands out over Wi-Fi to the Tello. Electrodes on the scalp capture EEG, electrodes on the forearm capture EMG, and a reference electrode holds a stable baseline so the noisy signals stay readable.
None of this is locked behind a vendor. The schematics and firmware are published, which means a hobbyist with a soldering iron and a Tello can rebuild the whole thing at home.
The Ryze Tello was my first really cheap drone, and I’ve always seen it as a bottomless source of new experiences. Now flying it with nothing but brainwaves? That’s another level for the old, faithful Tello. Which, by the way, was the first drone I ever reviewed on my YouTube channel.
How Brain And Muscle Signals Become Flight Commands
The interface reads three different biosignals and treats each as a separate input channel. EEG tracks electrical patterns from the brain, EMG tracks the voltage spikes when a muscle contracts, and EOG tracks the movement of the eyes by measuring the tiny charge difference across them.
The NPG Lite cleans each signal, filters out the noise, and watches for thresholds that map to a command. A deliberate muscle flex can trigger one action, an eye movement another. The board then issues the matching instruction to the Tello through its Wi-Fi link, the same channel the official Tello app uses.
The honest part of any BCI demo is latency and reliability. Biosignals are messy, and turning a noisy analog spike into a clean takeoff command is the hard engineering, not the flying. Upside Down Labs frames this as an educational platform for learning that pipeline, not a finished flight system you would trust over a crowd.
A Ryze Tello Is The Right Drone For This
The Tello, the budget drone Ryze built with DJI and Intel, is a common choice for this kind of work for good reasons. It weighs about 80 grams (2.8 oz), it is cheap, and it ships with a documented SDK that accepts simple text commands over Wi-Fi.
That open command set is the part that matters. A developer can send the Tello a takeoff or a directional command from any device on its network, which is exactly what a brain-computer interface needs on the receiving end. The drone does not care whether the command came from a phone or a microcontroller reading someone’s forearm.
A heavier camera drone would make this reckless. The Tello’s light weight and indoor-friendly size make it the safe sandbox for an input method that still misfires.
The Accessibility And Education Angle Is The Real Story
Strip the novelty away and the useful core is teaching. Upside Down Labs builds these boards for neuroscience education and sells DIY kits that walk students through recording their own biosignals. The drone is the flashy entry point to that catalog.
The project hands students a complete, documented path from raw biosignal to physical action, the same chain behind prosthetics and clinical BCI research. Flying a drone is just the demo that makes a teenager care.
The accessibility thread runs underneath all of it. An input system that flies a drone on muscle and eye signals is, in another form, an input system that could move a wheelchair or a cursor for someone who cannot use their hands. Open-sourcing the whole stack means a lab in any country can build on it without a licensing fee.
DroneXL’s Take
A brain-flown drone sounds like a headline gimmick, and as a flying machine, it mostly is. The Tello here is the toy that gets people in the door. The real payload is the open biosignal pipeline underneath it, and that is worth paying attention to even if you never strap on an electrode.
This educational build is off to a strong start. It isn’t the first drone ever flown by the mind, and it has plenty of room left to grow and get polished. What I like is the on-ramp it gives students: a clean, cheap way into both drones and hands-on engineering.
What is worth watching is whether the open biosignal boards keep getting cheaper and faster. The drone is a demo today. The same pipeline, refined, is the kind of thing that shows up in assistive tech and hands-free control long after the novelty clip stops circulating.
Photo credit: Upside Down Labs
