Show All Items This instructable will give you an EXTREMELY simple and quick way (< 15 minutes) to have an AR Parrot Drone 2.0 fly autonomously with code written by you! The best part of this project is it only requires the drone and a laptop (mac or windows). No modifications to the drone. I will also show you how to stream the video from the drone onto your laptop. Check out a sample program I wrote for my drone:   People have done CRAZY stuff with this, including having a drone that can follow peoples faces or be attracted to objects that are red. This guide is a step-by-step on how to use Felixge's node library to control your drone. Definitely check out what he's done. I did this through trial and error and pared it down to the essentials, best of luck!Step 1: The DroneShow All Items To program your drone, you will first need a drone! I am using an AR Parrot Drone 2.0. The first version may work, but no promises. You can find them at Radioshack, Amazon, etc. First you will need to get comfortable just controlling the drone with you smartphone/tablet.

Download one of the apps such as 'AR.FreeFlight 2.4' to control it. It might be a good idea to leave the indoor bumper hull on at first to minimize damage from collisions. I also suggest flying in an open field or park.Thinking about upgrading your AR.Drone to a more capable quadcopter? Have a look at this informative side-by-side comparison between a Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 and a DJI Phantom. The DJI doesn’t come with a camera but you can use it in combination with a GoPro. The DJI Phantom can be bought for around $450 at the moment of writing. That is excluding the GoPro. If you want an integrated camera you could go for the more expensive DJI Phantom 2 Vision which has an integrated camcorder but is double the price (~$1.000). MAVLink is a very lightweight, header-only message marshalling library for communicating with micro air vehicles. MAVLink was first released early 2009 by Lorenz Meier under a GPL license. The MAVLINK Common Message Set describes the various message headers.

You can integrate MAVLink with the Robot Operating System (ROS) in order to control your micro air vehicle. QGroundControl, the open source Micro Air Vehicle Ground Control Station / Operator Control Unit can be used to operate your Drone. It is based on PIXHAWK’s Groundstation. Further development is now done in a joint effort with the community. Have a look a the QGroundControl video to get an idea of its control interface. Parrot is planning to release the GPS Flight Recorder add-on for the AR Drone 2.0 on July 20th. The flight recorder connects through USB and will allow you to geolocate your AR.Drone, keep track of its position and store videos (4 GB onboard = 2 hours of video) in its built-in flash memory. You will be able to point to a location within the limits of the Wi-Fi connection on a map and the AR Drone will automatically fly there. Pressing the Return Home button will make the AR.Drone come straight back to its take-off point in a straight line. Flight recorder mode will allow you to track your AR Drone’s flight in 3D.

Micro Air Vehicle Communication Protocol (MAVLink) support will make it possible to program a detailed flight plan with QGround Control, available for Windows/Linux/MAc OSX. recently received their Leap Motion developer’s kit. Within a day they were able to control the AR.Drone with Leap Motion gestures based on the AR.Have a look at the video for some awesome Mission Impossible style Quadrotor controls.cheap drone with camera for sale A short while ago Felix Geisendörfer wrote a tool to install node.js on the AR.parrot ar drone 2 prisjaktDrone and wrote a library to control it with JavaScript. price of ar drone parrotAlthough developed for the AR.turbo drone quadcopter setup

Drone 2, it also appears to work for the first version of the AR. Graham Robinson has written a long explanation about the Siri-controlled AR.He based his AR.Drone+Siri hack on the Windows SDK for the AR.Drone built by Stephen Hobley, Thomas Endres and Julian Vinel, some SAP ABAP and the SiriProxy project by Pete Lamonica. Skip to around 4’11” for the Siri-demonstration in the video below.best drone with camera budget Since this month the official AR.top speed of ar droneFreeflight App is also available for Android devices and can be downloaded from the Android Market. Previously you had to rely on third party apps like AR.Pro, but now you can also use the official Parrot App on your Android device. Researchers from the computer science department at the Stevens Institute of Technology have added a 3G-radio to an AR.

Because of the mobile hookup the AR.Drone can be controlled from a greater distance than the normal wifi connection and can be maneuvred into the range of a wifi-network. It could then attack that network and gain access to the network with the onboard software. And once it has gained access it could be used to issue commands to a botnet, acting as a command-and-control-server, powered by a small solar panel. Because the attackers would dial-in to the AR.Drone through the 3G-connection and the drone would us wifi to hookup to a third party network it would be much harder to find out who was responsible for the botnet attacks. You can read further details about the SkyNET project in the paper that was presented by the researchers at the USENIX Security Conference in August. Spooky stuff if you ask me. Below you will find a 23 minute video by kenv8 explaining the previously mentioned AR. The flight range of the AR.Drone is limited because the wifi range is limited to somewhere between 30 – 100 meters depending on where you fly and whether you have line of sight.

Drone can be drastically extended to 1.5 – 2.5 kilometers by using RC equipment. The 2.4 GHZ RC hack instructions describe how the range can be extended in full detail. The actual flight range will depend on the RC transmitter & receiver used. According to the tutorial it has been tested to work with Spektrum DX6i and Spektrum AR6200 DSM2 6 Ch Rx Ultralite. The Spektrum DX7 with the AR6200 (2.4Ghz), Futaba 9CH with Assan module and X8R7 (2.4Ghz) and the JR790UL spcm Rx (72 Mhz) have also been tested to work according to the tutorial. You will need a 5 volt BEC (Battery-Elimination Circuit) to power the Arduino and the RC-receiver since the AR.Drone’s battery is 11.1 volt. This will cost you around $10. The wifi signal is passed from the RC-receiver to the AR.Drone through a small Arduino compatible device called YellowJacket ($55). The YellowJacket is based on the Arduino mini and comes with on-board wifi. You will need an USB breakout board ($14) as well to be able to program or transfer the Arduino sketches to the YellowJacket.