NodeCopter Brighton & kinect-drone

Last weekend I attended NodeCopter Brighton, a day of hacking AR-Drone’s and node.js. I wanted to control the drone by hand jestures using the Kinect’s motion detection abilities.

Links to the high-res versions (.mov, .mp4 or .ogv) of the video

Hackdays are funny, sometimes everything comes together, other times small things just trip you up. Unfortunately Saturday was a day when nothing seemed to work for me, mainly because I made the mistake of loading the wrong version of a USB driver.

On the upside that day I bumped into Aral getting coffee at Taylor St who pointed me to a project he did using Kinect with processing.

So after a couple of hours of hacking after the event, I could wave my hands and fly a drone. Once I had the right USB driver installed.

Thanks to everyone who made the day possible, I had a great time. I am glad with others, Madgex was able to sponsor the event.

You can download the project from github kinect-drone, enjoy