node-ar-drone

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