A drone distant designed to reinforce magic reveals

Maker tradition has all the time been a serious a part of magic efficiency. Some tips are well-rehearsed slight of hand, however lots of them depend on intelligent engineering to promote an phantasm. And trendy know-how affords quite a lot of attention-grabbing prospects. That’s the concept behind Peter Boie’s Engineering Marvel “STEM infused magic present.” That present features a drone and Boie wanted a solution to reliably management it, so he created this purpose-built distant.

This distant works with the Tello drone, which is an attention-grabbing piece of {hardware} all by itself. It’s an reasonably priced quadcopter that we’d usually categorize as a toy, besides that it incorporates high-quality DJI elements (and, presumably, flight management firmware) and versatile management schemes. Customers can begin flying immediately by piloting the drone with a smartphone app, however the drone also can reply to easy instructions despatched over Wi-Fi by any system. For instance, you may connect with the drone’s Wi-Fi community out of your PC and run a customized Scratch program to ship flight instructions.

Boie wanted a means to try this whereas performing throughout his magic present. He wanted to ship flight instructions with out drawing consideration from the viewers and that needed to be very dependable. His resolution was to construct a customized distant based mostly on the Arduino UNO R4 WiFi board.

Boie designed his personal defend that incorporates a number of buttons to set off particular flight instructions, resembling “go up 50” or “do a barrel roll.” That additionally has two massive, vibrant LEDs. These present a really clear indication of the Wi-Fi connection standing, so Boie doesn’t threat an onstage blunder if the connection fails for some motive. 

When it detects a button press, the Arduino sends the corresponding Tello command over WiFi as a UDP (Person Datagram Protocol) packet. Every button triggers a single perform and Boie can discover the buttons by contact on the customized 3D-printed enclosure, letting him deal with his magic efficiency.