node-ar-drone

It's actually just a wireless network that you connect to and send commands to the Parrot. It makes it really easy to control it from your laptop. There is a library for it that makes it possible to be up and running in under 5 minutes. Library: https://github.com/felixge/node-ar-drone

The Parrot AR.Drone runs Linux off the shelf, and its downward-facing camera and optical flow algorithms make it a great (very stable) platform. The main drawback is a lack of payload capacity and non-open flight control firmware. It's probably what you heard of with respect to Node.JS, because https://github.com/felixge/node-ar-drone is very popular. However, that project doesn't run Node.JS on the copter itself but rather on a control node, transmitting commands to the copter over WiFi. To build "fully programmable," self-contained drones in a more open manner, I've started with an off-the-shelf flight control system (in my case, an ArduPilot knockoff) and then attached an Android phone as payload, wired in to provide some control input via UART. This way the off-the-shelf flight control system can handle the hard real-time PID loops wi

I'd recommend the 3DRobotics Iris: https://store.3drobotics.com/products/IRIS Runs the PX4 autopilot (which I believe is hackable), can be controlled by RC, has good support for camera, gimballs, attachments, etc. The Parrot firmware is closed and I don't know about other firmware implementations, but the protocol is open so you can write clients to control is - https://github.com/felixge/node-ar-drone being one of the most well known.

https://github.com/felixge/node-ar-drone (powers my in-browser air traffic drone augmented reality app: http://lemondronor.com/blog/indexphp/2013/5/augmented-realit...)

I think this made an appearance here some time back, as well... [AR Drone + Node] https://github.com/felixge/node-ar-drone

This is so awesome. A handful of other Stanford students and I entered a Node+AR Drone hackathon in SF[1] a while back and we had a blast. We had so much fun, in fact, that we integrated AR Drone hacking into the Robotics Club. This started as a few friends messing with 2 drones and its grown to the point where I'm actually teaching NodeJS, Javascript+Coffeescript, a bit of Unix, and various algorithms to 35+ students fresh out of Stanford's Intro to Computer Science course! (Its still mostly the basics, but I've been writing up & posting lesson info here http://drones.johnback.us/). I'm very excited with what the various AR Drone communities have created so far. The popular Node library[2], a Go implementation (in progress) by the same author[3], and this Clojure option[4] are all amazing avenues for teaching interesting CS languages