Ever fancy programming a drone with your code? There are so many applications for these supposedly “toyish things” that it would provide a tremendous amount of power in the hands of a programmer if only they can get them working with their code. Now, I am not a hardware pro, and electronics are not my thing, hence my admiration for that esteem breed of nerd. Every once in a while I envision a service or app that can be exceptional with some custom electronics. Like recently, I have been thinking of security app and how IT can be involved in solving a problem or two. The directions that springs to my mind is apps, mobile and web of course and I have been incorporating some tech that are already existing such as GPS location tracking, messaging, WIFI and 3G connections, alert systems and such, all into a draft prototype.
One major, and cool feature that I thought would work with this application would be the inclusion of drones to render service when needed for an emergency. I discuss the difference applications of the drone here, you can see how it can be used in life-saving situations. So I started looking for a way to write code that can control drones, and I found Nodecopter, a node.js framework that works with the AR.Drone allowing developers perform drone animations; lift-off, fly forward, flip, rise to a specified altitude, land, etc, all in plain old javascript. The Nodecopter site lists all the requirements for learning the framework. Apparently Parrot the makers of AR-Drones, already released an SDK for doing the same thing in C.
I am so totally getting into this.
Resources:
[nodecopter.com] Nodecopter – see guys do cool stuff with drones
[nodecopter.com/hack] Nodecopter’s requirement page
[https://github.com/felixge/node-ar-drone] node ar-drone framework’s github page released by Parrot
[https://projects.ardrone.org/projects/show/ardrone-api] Parrot’s API for C coder
[http://eschnou.github.io/ardrone-webflight/] A desktop applciation for piloting drones