PortaParty

Inspiration

This project was inspired by the famous words of Ke$ha: "The party don't start till I walk in."

What it does

The drone will take off by itself through a web app, pilot itself with AI, then use visual data to hover over the owner. If the user is present in the visual field of the drone and there are enough people on the dance floor, the drone will lower a disco ball, turn on party lights, and start playing music.

How we built it

The Ball: inside the disco ball, there is an LED disco module which produces the lights and speakers which product the music and a raspberry pi that will send and HTTPS request to the drone's API, check if the party has started, and either wait 5 seconds to check again or turn on the lights and start the music. All these components are connected by a power regulator and two sets of parallel lithium ion batteries wired in series for a higher voltage drop. The drone’s disco ball lowers itself based on an inference made on an image detection AI called YOLOv3. This inference depends on the amount of people present in the drone’s visual field - when a certain number of people are seen by the drone, the disco ball drops and music plays. The web application is a react frontend, powered by a flask backend, both of which are hosted on a laptop.

Challenges we ran into

A significant challenge we ran into was trying to reverse engineer a websocket video client from javascript to python. Very bad documentation. Additionally we broke a really important drone api but we contacted the ceo of the drone company api in india and he got his entire team to fix the issue within a few hours. In hindsight we kinda needed those hours as a break even though we thought we wasted time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This was an extremely difficult project. Many facets. Fullstack software + embedded systems/ electrical engineering. We managed to build a project that not only is technically challenging but also comedic.