This is a collection of utilities related to the AR drone

Augmentation

drone augmentation can be found in lib/droner.coffee

events

Adds landed, landing, hovering, flying, batteryChange, and altitudeChange events to the drone. Being pulled into ar-drone core so will be removed

batteryLevel(cb)

returns battery level to callback

safeguard

disables emergency mode on start and adds error handles to prevent your app from crashing and having your drone fly off into space

record(loc)

Records raw video data to location (HD with higher framerate)

You'll need to run ffmpeg -i recording.h264 -vcodec copy recording.mp4 to convert it into an mp4. record will append video to your existing one so you can keep a log of your drone's entire history easily

enableControls(speed=0.5)

Adds controls via stdin to the drone - look below for these

enableFacialRecognition

Adds a processing step to PNG frames for running facial recognition. drone.faces will emit a data event with a PNG buffer that has circles drawn around faces

Controller

Depends on opencv for facial recognition

Run coffee face.coffee to control the drone from the command line with WASD

Controls:

w - forward
a - left
s - backward
d - right

arrow up - up
arrow left - spin left
arrow down - down
arrow right - spin right

<space> - land/takeoff
x - hover
r - disable emergency mode
1/2 - flipAhead/flipLeft

You can view the camera from localhost:8080

Installing node on the drone

(thanks felixge for doing the hard parts on this)

Run this command while connected to the drone's network

npm run-script deploy

REPL

Do you want your drone to control itself? Install ar-drone on it with

npm run-script setup

Now you can go into /data/video/labs where you have ar-drone and a repl.js to launch a repl. Run node repl.js and you're on your way. You can write any ar-drone scripts and run them from the drone itself now.

Now you can telnet into the drone and type node to run the repl