Drone Camp 2016

Group photo of campers with their drones

The campers & their drones

After a long year of learning about drones we traveled to Lake Balaton for a weekend to finally build them! During the weekend we assembled two quadcopters and modified an existing one to enable mobile control.

The controls

Although I am not good at building robots I especially like programming them. It was my job to create an app with which we can control the drones with a smartphone or a smartwatch. I built a bridge between a Syma drone and my phone based on this post.

Building the bridge wasn’t the hard part but designing intuitive controls for it was. On the mobile app I ended up copying most of the buttons from the traditional controller, on the watch however I needed a new approach.

As a start I reused the app I wrote for the Sphero. It contains 2D controls by tilting the watch. Now I needed a way to take off and manage altitude.

I had two choice: Using buttons and sliders or recognizing custom hand gestures based on the gyroscope data. Mainly because of time constraints I went with the first approach.