AresTech Startup/PiDrone

InspirationWild

We started out as a group of high school friends who sat next to each other in AP Computer Science class but never really interacted. One day, we just happened to talk about our interests and what we like to do in our free time. After a while, we learned that one of us was interested in hardware and back end development, one liked server-side development, the other was fascinated by graphic design and front end development. And just like that one by one, we learned how we could actually work together and use our passions to build something. We decided that we wanted to build an autonomous drone and wanted to use a raspberry pi to control it all - something that had quite literally never been done before. We recognized that this incredibly inexpensive drone could be used for a myriad of purposes: Emergency Drone Responder, Moving Automatic Traffic Cams, Drone Delivery System, 3-D Mapping, Wildlife Monitoring, and hundreds more. As we progressed with our project, we started to realize that there are so many more brilliant young minds with ideas just like ours. But these ideas remain ideas because of the lack of mentoring, support, and collaboration. We want to help others get together and explore their interests and get a hands on experience with computer science that a classroom simply cannot provide. If we had all chosen not to speak to each other, we would have never built this project and met each other. This is why we want to start this company up, so that we can help others make theirs dreams into realities.

What it does

The Startup itself is to provide support to help students and young minds collaborate on ideas to eventually make them projects. The Pi drone acts as an emergency responder in dire situations that need immediate eyes on the scene.

How we built it

We used a Raspberry Pi to send PWM signals through the speed controllers to the motors, and then connected a PiCamera to allow live video streaming for Emergency Response Personnel to identify the emergency situation and identify its needs. We also used a gyroscope to allow the drone to be stabilized and prevent crashes. We have also added a GPS module in order to allow for autonomous drone control. The Pi Drone also uses Bluetooth to allow commands to be sent over through mobile apps which are in the process of development. We have also added bright LED lights underneath the Drone in order for distressed civilians to identify with Emergency Response Drone

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was the intense lack of documentation for this kind of project as it has never been done before. Sending PWM signals through the Pi was very difficult as it was not even definitely possible to do it.