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)

Diagnosing problems using logs

For our ArduPilot, we used telemetry to communicate the drone to our Mission Planner. So, after the flight, we can analyze the telemetry logs. The telemetry logs are known as tlogs. There is Sik radio telemetry, Bluetooth telemetry, XBee, and so on. Before going any further, let's see where we can find the data files and how we can download them:

  1. In the home screen, you will find the telemetry logs below the Flight Data panel. From there you can choose the graph type after loading the log.
  2. When you load the logs, you will be redirected to a folder where the tlogs are situated. Click any of them to load. You can sort them by time so that you can be sure which data or log you need to analyze. You can also export your tlog data to a KML file for further analysis.

You can also see the 3D data of the flight path from the tlog files:

  1. Open the Mission...