Performing the control of the AR.Drone with the iOS or Android apps is really difficult. The controls are very unstable because the app virtual joystick hasn’t a good sensitivity response. The idea was to use a real joystick instead of the Parrot application itself:
So, to create an application to control the quadcopter, you need Linino with Node.js and the Ideino development environment on-board, that include a library for managing the pins of the board in Node.js. For installing Node.js and Ideino on the Yun, please refer to this guide: http://wiki.linino.org/doku.php?id=wiki:nodejscript
After setting up Node.js and Ideino, we looked around for a node module implementing all the necessary commands to pilot the AR.Drone. We found that the most used is ar-drone. The source code of the ar-drone module is available on GitHub (https://github.com/felixge/node-ar-drone). ar-drone module comes with a detailed documentation from which I deduced that the main commands for controlling the AR.Drone:
- take-off
- land
- stop
- left / right
- front / back
- up /down
- clockwise / counter clockwise
The following picture show how we associate the ar-drone commands with the joystick shield controls
Note that the Take Off / Landing commands are performed by a single button switch, located under the two potentiometers of the joystick.