FloNew Lets Drones Automatically Fly To iBeacons

Here is a fun drone hack from our Disrupt NY Hackathon. FloNew brings together Gimbal beacons, Esri mapping, Nexmo‘s communications platform and Parrot’s RollingSpider MiniDrones. Using FloNew’s mobile app, you can automatically send your drone to any of your nearby beacons.

During our hackathon, Andre Smith and Gabriel Velez built the mobile app to deploy the drone and hacked into the MiniDrone to be able to control it (Parrot doesn’t make that especially easy). Sadly, the onstage demo failed because the drone didn’t have a line of sight to the gimbal beacon, but the team had set up four beacons and the idea was to have the drone move between them with a push of a button.

Clearly, the practical applications for delivering goods with ParrotMini drones is limited. But hey — it’s a hackathon project, not a competitor to Amazon’s PrimeAir project.The whole system uses Bluetooth LE, so the range is pretty limited anyway.

You can find the code the team developed for this project on GitHub. What’s cool here is that Smith and Velez used Node.js to build this project, so if you ever wanted to use JavaScript to control a drone, this is your chance.

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