TL;DR Go to the videos at the bottom🙂
In this VII ΠWeek I wanted to work with a drone and Arduino. I love this technology and this week is the perfect excuse to spend between threads, cables, boards and sketches. When you fiddle with Arduino, you must know or learn about hardware and software as well.
I had some goals for this week: learn more about “the internet of things”, combine some components into new stuff, and mostly have fun!
The project was made with Alex and we both built a glove with sensors to drive the drone. The main componentes were:
- Parrot ARDrone, controlled via WiFi
- Arduino Yún (with Arduino microprocessor and Linux)
- A Python library to communicate with the drone: libardrone
- sensors (pressure, flexometer and accelerometer)
The week was quite epic: on monday the drone bolted and it got some gears broken; on tuesday the Yún stopped working, but we could continue our work with an Arduino Uno until we could repair the Yún. On wednesday we could repair the drone, but we found arbitrary errors related to the WiFi… It was very challenging because some of the pieces were under our control, but other ones (important ones!) were not, so we were facing the possibility of aborting the mission.
Luckily, none of these obstacles were definitive, so we could achieve some of our initial aims and we reached the demo save and sound!
Despite I have worked with Arduino very few times, and I haven’t explored all its possibilities, it amazes me to be able to build something like this; it would be easyly combined with, let’s say, a bionic arm cosplay or used to make awesome and impossible videos.
If you want a more detailed view about the process and the tools, you can read in the long post I wrote in my blog.