WARNING: To avoid personal injury or damage to objects around you, I would suggest flying drones in outdoor open areas, preferably in an open field with little to no wind. It goes without saying that you should not fly drones in restricted areas, or record video/pictures of others without their consent. I recently started playing around with an AR Drone 2.0 by Parrot. There is a companion app available on iOS, Android and Windows 8. But I really wanted to use my Xbox controller for better control, and also tweak the app to make improvements and add functionality. Like any efficient software developer, I set out to look for some existing code out there, so that I could tinker with it and build upon it. I found the source code for a Windows Store app on Github: The last update to this repo was Summer 2013 (about 2 years ago, as of this blog post), so I wasn’t sure if the code would work on my current machines. It turns out that the store app was built for Windows 8, before the Windows 8.1 update.

I tried it out on 2 devices: On both machines, I was able to run the app and fly the drone. I would recommend updating the Windows 8 store app projects to retarget Windows 8.1. This can be done by right-clicking any 8.0 store app project and then choosing the “Retarget…” option. I also enabled Nuget package restore, and updated my Nuget packages for the solution. If you’re unfamiliar with this option in Visual Studio, read the “Package Restore Consent” section in the following documentation: I used a wired Xbox 360 controller for my tests. Note that you cannot use a wireless Xbox 360 controller, with a play-and-charge cable, since it doesn’t support enough bandwidth for both power and data. I also connected an Xbox One controller with a standard USB charging cable (obtained from the Xbox One Play and Charge Kit), and verified that the app recognized the wireless Xbox One controller as well. To run the app and connect to the drone, you should go through the following steps:

Once the app is running and connected, you can start flying right away! For a video clip of the flying drone, check out this short clip that my nephew captured of me flying the drone with an Xbox 360 controller: I tried clicking the picture icon (or clicking A) on the controller to trigger a picture, but couldn’t get the picture functionality to work with the Windows app, built from the GitHub source code.parrot ar drone heli NOTE: The official app on the Windows Store appears almost identical to the GitHub project, but it was updated as recently as March 2015. parrot ar drone ultrasound alertAlso, the photo feature appears to work without any issues, in the official app. parrot ar drone plane

I inserted a USB stick and was able to capture photos from the drone using the app that I downloaded from the Windows Store. But this blog post is about the source code found on GitHub. So, I’ll continue to tinker with it… The GitHub page for the aforementioned project does have a discussion thread about the TakePicture() method, but the suggested solution (USB stick + FTP access) didn’t work for me. ar drone 2 high capacity batteryI didn’t get any error message, but I didn’t see any pictures being captured on my machine or on a USB stick connected to the drone.ar drone 2 vision alert So, my next step is to troubleshoot the picture-taking feature, and possibly write my own routines.ar drone 2 enregistrement usb

As an alternative, I did try some standard methods of capturing a screenshot. For more info, read the following tutorial: However, I ran into issues while trying to capture the viewport of the drone’s built-in camera, which is represented by a MediaElement tag in the XAML markup. My code was able to capture a screenshot of the app’s window, but ignored the camera’s view. Apparently, this is a known limitation of RenderTargetBitmap. From the MSDN documentation in the above URL, “Video content in a MediaElement or CaptureElement can’t be captured using RenderTargetBitmap. That includes capturing frames from within video content.” Some older discussion threads talk about a Render() method that can be used to capture a snapshot of a MediaElement. However, this Render() method is in a namespace called “Namespace: System.Windows.Media.Imaging”, which is in an Assembly called PresentationCore (in PresentationCore.dll). I performed a quick search for this assembly on my machine, and only found it in a Windows.old folder, so it is no longer in use by newer versions of Windows.

Default control is a half speed mode to make learning and landing easier! Front/Back => Forward / Backward Left/Right => Strafe Left / Strafe Right Front/Back => Up / Down Left/Right => Rotate Counter Clockwise / Rotate Clockwise X => Reset Emergency Back => Toggle Light Touch Mode Left => Flip Left Right => Flip Right Both => Flip Forward Left => Rotate Counter Clockwise Right => Rotate ClockwiseThe guide will help you to get started with NodeCopter hacking in any All NodeCopter hacking is done using the Parrot AR Drone The AR Drone 1.0 may also be supported by some libraries, but most of the community uses 2.0 drones. We are not married to the Parrot drones, but so far we have not found any alternatives that offer competitive pricing, automatic hovering, global distribution, easy repairs and are shipped fully assembled. In most countries the best place to buy a drone is your national version of

won’t get a discount, but shipping is usually very fast and they often also carry the repair parts you may need. If Amazon is not a viable option for you, you should consider the manufacturers Shipping can be slow, but they can deliver all parts to almost any country in For those willing to go the extra mile for a good deal, we recommend Ebay orYou can often find used drones or drones with minor damage. Repairing the drones is easy, so unless the damage is much bigger than advertised, you should be able to save a decent amount of money. Last but not least, there are several brick and mortar retailers, you can find Before starting your drone for the first time, you may want to know about this: Make sure that you have Node.js installed. First off, you should get the FreeFlight app for your iOS device if you don’t have it already. Now connect to the drone’s WiFi with your smartphone, start the FreeFlight app and make a test flight with it’s Piloting feature to learn how the drone behaves.

It’s also a good time to check if the firmware of the drone is up to date. setup the drones for exact instructions. But controlling the drone with the phone is boring, let’s program it! the drone’s WiFi with your laptop and install the ar-drone module: Once you’ve done that, save this to a file:See how your drone takes of, rotates clockwise and even does a flip!Now you’re set, go ahead and get crazy! Per default, the drone will only fly very slowly and won’t fly higher than 3m. These limits can be lifted via the mobile app or a library that supports it. Here is an example for setting the limit to 100m using the Looks like the emergency mode is in effect. To easy ways to fix this: Normally, if you’re connected to your drone’s WiFi you don’t have connection toThis is not very convenient, so an easy way out is letting the AR drone connect to a WiFi accesspoint. Connect to an open network If you have access to an open network (no WPA or similar), you can simply: