Twilio-Copter

Fly a Parrot AR Drone 2.0 quadcopter by calling a phone number.

Introduction

Using the power of telephony, you can fly an AR-Done using nothing more than a phone call. Sadly, a rotary phone will not work because you will be piloting the drone using DTMF tones.

Requirements

• Node
• Parrot AR Drone 2.0
• Free Twilio account
• Open Wi-Fi network (no password)

Installation

Clone this repo, cd into it and run npm install.

Turn on your AR Drone and connect your laptop to its Wi-Fi access point. Then telnet into it:

telnet 192.168.1.1

Once you're in, execute the following one-liner command. Please insert a valid and open Wi-Fi access point in between the mustache braces. You can also use a different IP address than 192.168.1.10 if you need to. Just make note of what it is.

killall udhcpd; iwconfig ath0 mode managed essid {{OPEN WIFI ACCESS POINT HERE}}; ifconfig ath0 192.168.1.10 netmask 255.255.255.0 up;

At this point your telnet session will lock up. THIS IS OK. Just ctrl-C or kill the telnet session.

Now, connect your laptop to the same wireless access point that you specified above. This will place your computer and the drone on the same network.

Getting Ready to Fly

First, spin-up your Node server:

node .

Next, you need to expose your Node server to the public internet. I like using Ngrok for this. It's free and completely awesome. If you decide to install Ngrok, you can then make your Node server available on the public internet like this:

ngrok 8080

Last, connect Twilio to your Node server. Just log-in to your account, select the number you want to use and set the Voice Request URL to the public internet address of your webserver, including a path to /voice. So an example URL might be: https://foobar.ngrok.com/voice. Remember to click Save.

Fly the Drone!

Finally, you're ready to fly your drone! Just dial your Twilio number and you should hear a simple greeting. When you're ready to fly, here are the commands you can use:

• • • Take off

• - Land

• 1 - Up
• 7 - Down
• 2 - Forward
• 8 - Back
• 4 - Turn left
• 6 - Turn right

Enjoy piloting your drone! Ping me @CarterRabasa if you have any questions.

Meta

• No warranty expressed or implied. Software is as is.
• MIT License
• Brought to you by Twilio Seattle