I wanted to share an update with a new version of DroneBlocks Desktop Beta that has the following capabilities:
- Ability to toggle video stream on and off
- Mission pad blocks
The ability to toggle the video stream helps tremendously when having several drones flying at a time. This should reduce the amount of wireless traffic and allow for more successful coordination of flight between many drones and computers.
Mission pad support is something we’ve been wanting to develop for a long time. We figured it makes sense to start with the desktop version so we can sort through any bugs. Then we’ll be bringing this capability to our iOS, Android, and Chrome apps. Here is a screen shot of a the mission pad blocks in action:
and a video demonstrating the same mission:
Let me briefly walk through how the mission pad blocks work.
- The first block turns on mission pad detection
- The second block sets mission pad detection to use the downward facing camera
- Takeoff over mission pad #1
- Fly to 0, 0, 60 from mission pad #1
- Jump to 60, 0, 60 from mission pad #1 and if we see mission pad #4 yaw 180 agrees from the forward facing rocket on mission pad #4
- Fly to 20, 20, 20 from mission pad #4 (at this point we have “jumped” to mission pad #4)
- Fly to 0, 0, 20 from mission pad #4 (this will center us 20 in above mission pad #4)
- Land
Mission pads will provide for more fine-grained control of Tello’s flight pattern and allow you to reposition the drone over a given pad. Mission pads can also be used for logic detection. For example, you could say if mission pad #1 is visible fly right or if mission pad #3 is visible fly left.
We’ll share some more details as we get further down the road with mission pads, but please help us test this release and share any feedback you may have! Link to test is below and we hope you enjoy!
