WADE The Drone

Inspiration

We wanted to create a fun drivable drone. Our prompt was to create social good in a local community. So, for our community, we chose those who would normally be unable to control a drone like this. These include children, the elderly, the disabled, and others of the like. We named our drone WADE (Wirelessly Assisted Driveable Explorer).

What it does

Go to wadethedrone.online on a smartphone in order to start controlling the drone. The website uses your phone's gyroscope to control the drone and a video feed is sent back to the phone's screen of what the drone sees through its front-mounted camera.

How we built it

Disassembled a couple of RC cars for parts and put together a drone built of recycled durable cardboard. Assembled with an Arduino for motor and servo control and a raspberry pi with a web camera for video feedback.

Challenges we ran into

Everything except the gyroscope. The motors were not cooperating, we were unable to control the servo for steering well, and the Bluetooth capabilities did not come to fruition.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A working amplification circuit that our team member made, getting the gyroscope on the phone to work so well, and using recycled parts to make the drone (or as much as we were able to make).

What we learned

Even something that seems simple (even excluding our camera plans), can be overly complicated for a hackathon. One of our team members made an amplification circuit and learned to debug, other members learned how to use javascript to read and use gyroscope data, and we all learned a little bit of Bluetooth (and how it's quite complicated if you don't know what you're doing).

What's next for WADE The Drone

We salvaged what we could of our project for the final hackathon presentation. Since our gyroscope worked well, we turned this into a tool for those with internal tremors to try to remain stabilized.