TelloPilot

TelloPilot is a collection of experiments using DJI's Tello SDK to communicate with the Tello drone. For ease of use, the TelloPy package is used for the communication protocol.

Currently, the supported features include:

• Controlling the drone with a keyboard
• Face detection using computer vision
• Face tracking to keep the main subject in frame

Setup

This project was implemented and run on a Windows machine. To setup the project:

1. Create a Python virtual environment:

python -m venv venv

2. Activate the virtual environment:

source venv/Scrips/activate   (Windows)

or

source venv/bin/activate      (Mac/Linux)

2. Install the requirements:

pip install -r requirements.txt

For Windows, use instead

pip install -r requirements-windows.txt

This is due to issues with installing PyAV on Windows. To resolve this, the package must be installed manually.

Installing PyAV (Windows only)

PyAV depends on ffmpeg to work, and so they must be downloaded first.

1. Download ffmpeg (both the shared and dev packages).
2. Unpack both packages somewhere on your local machine (e.g. C:\ffmpeg).
3. Clone or download the zip of PyAV in this project's directory. If the zip is downloaded, make sure to unpack it.
4. cd into the PyAV directory and run python setup.py build --ffmpeg=\\path\\to\\ffmpeg. Make sure your Python virtual environment is activated first.
5. Install PyAV with python setup.py install. Once this is done, you can safely remove the cloned PyAV repo.

Running the project

To get the project started, run python main.py in the src directory.

Troubleshooting

If the video stream connection is timing out, try turning of your firewall.