GoPro HD Hero 960 hull mod for AR.Drone

Posted on June 9, 2011 by Albert

The video quality of the onboard camera of the AR.Drone leaves a lot to be desired. DroneScapes has done some serious modding of the AR.Drone hull to accommodate a GoPro Hero 960. Because it is a light weight HD-camera it is ideally suited to be used on an AR.Drone. In earlier hacks the camera was fitted to the top of the AR.Drone. This one is different in that it alters the shape of the hull body to fit the camera in the actual hull.

Hull modding

If your fingers are itching to do some serious AR.Drone Hull surgery you can prepare by reading the step-by-step instruction of this mod on the Dronescapes website.

Posted in External camera | 2 Comments

Natural Kinect-Based Interface for AR.Drone

Posted on June 9, 2011 by Albert

The Visualization and Graphics Group of the Dipartimento die Automaytica e Informatica of the Politecnico di Torino in Italy have made a natural kinect-based interface for the AR.Drone. It uses Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit (FAAST), PrimeSense NITE and OpenNI to interface to the kinect and DLL Drone to connect to the AR.Drone itself.

Leaning forward, backwards, to the left and to the right will make the drone move in those directions. Raising and lowering your left arm will control the drone’s height. Raising your right arm will make the drone take off as you can see in the demonstration video below.

Posted in OpenNI, Video | Leave a comment

AR.Drone summoning with Kinect

Posted on April 8, 2011 by Albert

If you wouldn’t know any better this might look like some kind of sorcerer summoning a flying object. Another video of controlling the AR.Drone by making gestures in front of a Kinect. Development was done by Tom Zickel. I have not found any details yet about what tools he used.

Posted in Kinect, Video | 3 Comments

Urbi running natively on AR.Drone now!

Posted on March 28, 2011 by Albert

Psykokwak, who previously hooked Urbi to the drone, has now managed to get Urbi running natively on the AR.Drone. In the video below you can see how you can upload a tar-file to your AR.Drone. After extracting the tar-file you can start Urbi and control the AR.Drone through Gostai Lab. With Urbi running on the drone itself (instead of sending commands to it from a computer running Urbi) a whole new level of hacking your AR.Drone has become reality. For performance reasons streaming video from the drone has been disabled for now.

In the following video you can see how Psykokwak controls the drone with Urbi running natively through Gostai Lab.

Posted in Urbi SDK | 2 Comments

AR.Pro App for Android devices

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Albert

AR.Pro is an AR.Drone App for the Android platform developed by Shellware. The software is still in beta but can already be downloaded from the Android Market. In the video below the developer demonstrates how you can enable infrastructure wifi-networking with the AR.Drone. At the end of the video you can get a glimpse of the software in action.

Posted in AR.Drone Apps | 1 Comment

Controlling the AR.Drone through Microsoft Surface

Posted on January 27, 2011 by Albert

If you thought that the availability of AR.Drone control software on the iPad was a big step with regards to screen size wait till you see the French video below in which a drone is controlled through a table-size Microsoft Surface.

Posted in Video | 1 Comment

Controlling the AR.Drone with a Nokia N900

Posted on January 26, 2011 by Albert

Kate Alhola has written a MeeGo application to control the AR.Drone on Nokia devices like the N900. Watch the demo video below or read the full explanation on Kate’s blog. There is a full explanation on the various components of the app and how it can be built.

Posted in AR.Drone Apps | 3 Comments

Controlling the AR.Drone with a Kinect controller

Posted on December 21, 2010 by Albert

It was a matter of time before someone hooked the Kinect controller up to the AR.Drone. Apparently Lonergan Harrington has connected the Kinect controller with the OpenNI framework to the AR.Drone. You can see his experiments in the following video.

Posted in Kinect, OpenNI, Video | Leave a comment

Dronehacks on Twitter

Posted on December 15, 2010 by Albert

You can follow @dronehacks on Twitter now and get updates when new articles are posted or for the occasional short tweet.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

AR.Drone Control App for Windows and Microsoft .Net

Posted on December 10, 2010 by Albert

Parrot itself does not yet offer a Windows SDK for the AR.Drone. That is why Stephen Hobley, Thomas Endres, Julien Vinel have been working on an .Net SDK and a Windows control application for the AR.Drone. ARDrone-Control-.NET has been released last week and the source code is up on GitHub.

The AR.Drone can be controlled through DirectX inputs, like joysticks as well as keyboard and the Wiimote. Display of camera video is supported and can be saved from the control application.

Stephen has a short demonstration up on Youtube in which he explains and demonstrates the various possibilities of the control program.

Posted in AR.Drone SDK | 24 Comments