Two or three years ago it seemed that there was a lot of hacking happening on the AR.Drone: We had the Drone Games (née Drone Olympics), the ar-drone node modul

Two or three years ago it seemed that there was a lot of hacking happening on the AR.Drone: We had the Drone Games (née Drone Olympics), the ar-drone node module was under active development, and there was even an effort to write a replacement firmware. Now, http://dronegames.co/ http://dronegames.co/ is still touting the 2013 Games. Parrot has released many new drones since the AR.Drone, but from what I can tell it's not that the hackers are now working on the Bebop or Rolling Spider; I'm not sure where they went. I'm a committer on the ar-drone node library, but lately I've mostly been working on turboshrimp, a clojure library for AR.Drone control: https://github.com/wiseman/turboshrimp https://github.com/wiseman/turboshrimp (API docs at http://wiseman.github.io/turboshrimp/com.lemondronor.turboshrimp.html http://wiseman.github.io/turboshrimp/com.lemondronor.turbosh...). I've also got an Android app (written in Clojure)[1] and a desktop app that uses the CamShift tracking algorithm with OpenCV, which lets you select a target of interest and then will continue to track that target[3]. The AR.Drone is still a really nice, relatively hackable robotics platform. Running Linux and having USB lets you do things like connect an RTL-SDR dongle[4] and display an overlay of nearby aircraft on the drone video stream[5]. [1] https://github.com/wiseman/shrimpdroid https://github.com/wiseman/shrimpdroid [2] https://github.com/wiseman/turboshrimp-tracker/ https://github.com/wiseman/turboshrimp-tracker/ [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In6KFGakGGw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=In6KFGakGGw [4] http://lemondronor.com/blog/indexphp/2013/4/cheap-ads-b-on-amateur-drones http://lemondronor.com/blog/indexphp/2013/4/cheap-ads-b-on-a... [5] http://lemondronor.com/blog/indexphp/2013/5/augmented-reality-display-of-air-traffic-for-drones http://lemondronor.com/blog/indexphp/2013/5/augmented-realit...