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:
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!
@Janine FYI we released a new version since I last posted. This version includes everything mentioned above regarding mission pads plus manual keyboard control like we have in our Chrome App. You can download it here:
Keyboard control is available when you go to fullscreen mode. Here are the key mappings:
T = takeoff
W = fly up
A = yaw left
S = yaw right
D = fly down
I = fly forward
J = fly left
K = fly backward
L = fly right
SPACE = land
If you want to try some flips (battery must be > 50%) use the arrow keys. Let us know how it goes!
We are finally getting around to testing this and on initial tests are over the moon! We love the keyboard control and it seems much more stable. The one issue we have found is around rendering the workspace. I have included an image below:
As you can see in the image, the top menu bar seems to be rendered incorrectly and the camera view rapidly expands and shrinks. I wasn’t sure how aware you were of these so I wanted to flag them just in case. Like I said we are over the moon with this offline version!
If possible, we would also love to see an option for the virtual sticks in this version since we use Surfaces and want to leverage the touchscreen.
Again, I cannot thank you enough for your and your team’s hard work and we will report back at the end of the week with any other observations.
Here is an updated version with some bug fixes. Please read through the post to see what we’re working on next. Leave us any feedback there and thanks for helping us test!
