After over 7 years of serving the drone community and fostering some of the first public DJI hacks—including the last 3 years under my stewardship—DJI-Rev has now closed.
This is a bittersweet occasion, and not a decision I have taken lightly. It has been on my mind for some time. The main reason is that the "scene" simply isn't what it used to be. At its height 5–6 years ago, the community was vibrant, with many contributors and skilled hardware hackers deploying their techniques to crack these drones wide open simply because they could.
Over time, projects like NLD, DH and even to an extent DDD introduced a commercial aspect to the scene, and with drones becoming something more people owned the industry as a whole shifted focus towards CUAS creating new jobs for skilled people. Exploits, tips, and techniques that were once freely shared became valuable assets both for the community made commercial projects and for the CUAS positions alike, and the people who made this community thrive understandably sought payment for their work. A position i do not disagree with.
As the years went by, many of these pioneers—“OGs” as they’re called around here—retired from the drone scene or left the public space due to constant demands for new exploits, careers in CUAS, or other personal reasons. For a while, DJI-Rev carried on, buzzing with general chatter, but the depth and innovation it once offered gradually faded. It became flooded with newbies asking the same repetetive questions that the group had answered numerous times over the previous 7 years, this is not what this group was set up to do.
Recently, the community has become too quiet. It has stagnated. Over he previous 30 days since this decision was made back in December 2024, we’ve averaged fewer than 10 posts per day, reflecting a long-running downward trend in activity and thus, the usefulness of this platform. DJI-Rev is simply no longer required. Its its original purpose when the Slack group was first set up was simple, bring skilled hackers together to break into DJI's hardware in a safe space that we control. It seems that mission has been acomplished & i could not be prouder of the skills and work i have seen during this time.
Given the nature of our discussions and the sensitive information shared here, I cannot in good conscience pass the project on to someone else. The platform contains personal data, and I don’t believe it’s my place to decide who should be trusted with it. For the reasons discussed, I have always believed that when it was time, DJI-Rev must close and not be passed on.
Thank you for all the memories, contributions, and shared passion for drones. It’s been a wild ride, and I, like many of you, have met some incredible people through this platform—people I still talk to today and consider friends even if we have never met in person.
I cannot possibly recall everyones name, but thankyou to all of the OG's, especially to freaky123 for setting up the original slack, Hostile for herding us all together (i believe you once described it as herding cats!), Bin4ry for starting Drone-Hacks, Quad808 for just being an awesome friend and of course Jcase for suggesting i took over stewardship of the community when we needed to leave Slack. You and many, many others made my time within the community so much fun.
Although this chapter is ending, the spirit of innovation and camaraderie continues in other forums and communities, now more focused on specific goals. If you want to hack your drone, go check out Drone-Hacks. If you are more interested or knowledgeable in the professional side, CUAS, red teaming, forensics, reverse engineering, policy etc, join the Drone Security Discord. Below, you’ll find links to those spaces.
For a limited time (until the domain name expires at the end of October 2025), there is a read-only export available of all public channel chats. If you wish to access this, there is a button for it at the bottom of the page. This has limited functionality but all public chats are visible and searchable.
Cs2000, signing off.
DJI-Rev 07/2017 - 02/2025