Book Image

Building Smart Drones with ESP8266 and Arduino

By : Syed Omar Faruk Towaha
Book Image

Building Smart Drones with ESP8266 and Arduino

By: Syed Omar Faruk Towaha

Overview of this book

With the use of drones, DIY projects have taken off. Programmers are rapidly moving from traditional application programming to developing exciting multi-utility projects. This book will teach you to build industry-level drones with Arduino and ESP8266 and their modified versions of hardware. With this book, you will explore techniques for leveraging the tiny WiFi chip to enhance your drone and control it over a mobile phone. This book will start with teaching you how to solve problems while building your own WiFi controlled Arduino based drone. You will also learn how to build a Quadcopter and a mission critical drone. Moving on you will learn how to build a prototype drone that will be given a mission to complete which it will do it itself. You will also learn to build various exciting projects such as gliding and racing drones. By the end of this book you will learn how to maintain and troubleshoot your drone. By the end of this book, you will have learned to build drones using ESP8266 and Arduino and leverage their functionalities to the fullest.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Preparing Your Drone for Flying

As you are reading this chapter, I assume you have assembled your DIY quadcopter and now you want to program it for flying. In this chapter, we will make our drone ready for flying. But as I said before, you can use an awesome Wi-Fi module, ESP8266, as the Wi-Fi telemetry device to receive data from your drone to your computer. In this chapter, we will learn about using the ESP8266 module with our ArduPilot and Arduino, so that you can use an ESP8266 wherever you need to. We will also learn about calibrating our quadcopter and configuring our ArduPilot software. Some of the things in the following list will be discussed in this chapter too:

  • Types of software to control and program the Arduino
  • How we can connect the ESP8266 to the Arduino board
  • Details about the ESP8266 module
  • Coding for the ESP8266
  • Controlling the ESP8266 from a smartphone
  • Calibrating...