Book Image

Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1

By : Ty Audronis
Book Image

Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1

By: Ty Audronis

Overview of this book

The Ardupilot platform is an application ecosystem that encompasses various OS projects for drone programming, flight control, and advanced functionalities.The Ardupilot platform supports many Comms and APIs, such as DroneKit, ROS, and MAVLink. It unites OS drone projects to provide a common codebase. With the help of this book, you will have the satisfaction of building a drone from scratch and exploring its many recreational uses (aerial photography, playing, aerial surveillance, and so on). This book helps individuals and communities build powerful UAVs for both personal and commercial purposes. You will learn to unleash the Ardupilot technology for building, monitoring, and controlling your drones.This is a step-by-step guide covering practical examples and instructions for assembling a drone, building ground control unit using microcontrollers, QgroundControl, and MissionPlanner. You can further build robotic applications on your drone utilizing critical software libraries and tools from the ROS framework. With the help of DroneKit and MAVLink (for reliable communication), you can customize applications via cloud and mobile to interact with your UAV.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Using Bluetooth to control Pixhawk with a phone


Bluetooth with Pixhawk is a snap. But just like every other bit of Pixhawk functionality, an add-on module needs to be purchased. We picked up the one shown as follows:

Of course, we had to alter the cable (just as we did before) because the cable included with this module is for the old-style plugs. We connected our Bluetooth module to the Telem 1 port as shown in the following figure:

Now, it's just a matter of binding our Android device's Bluetooth to the Pixhawk's Bluetooth. Just power on your Pixhawk and bind using the same method you would for any Bluetooth device. The software to control Pixhawk from a mobile device is called DroidPlanner 2. It's free!

We're not quite there yet, but if you're curious on how to get a Pixhawk vehicle to follow you using DroidPlanner 2, it's easy! Just click on the Follow button, and set the radius you'd like the rover to stay within. Of course, you can ignore the altitude attribute (as this is a ground vehicle...