TCP server to control a drone.

Also, drone video stream.

This is some base code. Feel free to change or extend.

Download this repo:

$ git clone https://github.com/pgte/node-drone-server-base.git
$ cd node-drone-server-base

Install dependencies:

$ npm install

Also, you need to have ffmgep installed to run the video server.

https://www.ffmpeg.org/

$ npm start

• DRONE: IP Address for the drone. Defaults to "192.168.1.1".
• COMMAND_PORT: TCP command server port. Defaults to 3001.
• VIDEO_PORT: HTTP video server port. Defaults to 3002.
• NOVIDEO: Launch without the video server

Besides an HTTP server running on port 3000, this also launches a TCP server running on port 3001.

You can accesss it from the command line by using, for instance telnet or (preferably) netcat:

$ nc localhost 3000

Now you can issue commands.

Each command is a JSON-encoded array terminated by a new-line character.

Each command has the following structure:

[<command>, <arguments>, <id>]

The command is a string identifying the command ("takeoff", "land", "stop", "up", "down", "left", "right", etc..).

arguments is an array of arguments. Can be empty ([]), or contain the arguments required for that specific command (see the available commands and arguments in the ar-drone API docs).

id is a mandatory number that identifies the command

To each command, the server responds with a new-line terminated and JSON-encoded string like this:

[<result>, <id>]

result is an array. The first position of that array is the error (null if no error, and the second is the result, if any).

$ nc localhost 3001
["takeoff",[],1]
[[null],1]
["left",[0.1],2]
[[null],2]

There is a video server running on port 3002.

Go to http://localhost:3002/nodecopter.mjpeg to check it out.

(if you want to launch without a video server, set the NOVIDEO environment variable to true).

If you need to change the server output format, change the ffserver.conf file.