Ulf Schleth

by Ulf Schleth

Vortex — an FPV simulator for slow horses.

Because I mostly work with slow CPUs, integrated graphics and old ThinkPads, where even VelociDrone struggles, I started to vibecode an FPV simulator which has the target to be simple and as fast as possible. It is mainly meant for stick coordination training, which works on old hardware and on the road. Even with vibecoding this took a large amount of time, and I see how much hard work it is to maintain it. If thousands of other FPV sims get vibecoded now that these shitty AIs are in the world, and one of them solves this problem better than Vortex, I’ll happily delete mine.. It is also possible that I lose interest and stop developing it. It will not be open source for now – maybe later, maybe not.

Vortex is work in progress, still far away from version 1, but it is flyable. It is written in plain Rust, which talks directly to your hardware through OpenGL – no engine, no textures, no postprocessing. The scene is procedural, so the binary needs no data files. The physics follows real drone behaviour – fixed-rate simulation, battery sag, a Betaflight-style rate model with expo and airmode, learned from my own blackbox logs of a real 5-inch quad. For now, it is only available for linux-x86_64.

Installation

download the tar.gz, extract it, run install.sh once (it sets up radio access), then start ./vortex from the extracted folder. A calibration wizard runs on first start: arm and reset switches, then all four stick axes. Press C for the config menu, S for race mode, H for the HUD, O for the stick overlay, F11 for fullscreen.

This page is the single point of truth for the software. There is no installer, no telemetry, no account – just a small binary. Come back later to see if something changed in the changelog. Every build carries a visible build stamp in its startup output, for example v0.1.0-b26100213, so feedback can always be matched to the exact binary.

Please give me feedback – just leave a comment below. Tell me which machine you flew on and what you think about the haptics and how it compares to the real thing.

Changelog

2026-10-04: first public version.