Fly Team

A hand gesture controlled drone, with sensors which communicate in real time with an interactive IoT platform.

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Building something more than just a toy controlled by joystick. We wanted to build a drone, as a station for sensors, which could come as close as possible to an intuitive flying experience. So we built a “Hawk” which has capabilities to hold multiple sensors, including a video camera and is controlled by gloves equipped with flexometer and accelerometer to form an intuitive gesture controlled flying experience. But it goes beyond this, we wanted our drone to be more than a pleasing toy, we built into it a sensor station which communicates with a remote IoT platform, the data collected by the sensors is communicated through an interactive API called Ubidots. The development procedure was filed with difficulties both at the hardware and the software level. One of the major challenge was lack of WiFi shields which created many problems for communication between different parts of the project. And we came up with an ingenious solution of using another development board which was equipped with an embedded wifi shield in serial with our Arduino Nano, but it was not as straight forward as it seemed in the beginning, the communication between the boards was very slow and we had to decrease the amount of data in communication. we also had many difficulties in putting together different components of the drone and making them communicate with each other and behave as one system. Also, none of the team members had any experience in any front end development. Hence, communicating with Ubidots API was quite a challenge in itself. The entire ecosystem in HackUPC helped us think of our project in a wider spectrum and we realize that such a drone based sensor station can serve in many industrial and social applications. We look forward to keep working on our project with better and more optimized hardware and making it a complete solution.

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