Some information from my application

I love programming, I love radio controlled aircraft, and I love electronics.  This project allows me to combine all 3!

Quadcopters have been around for many years.  However in recent news the FAA and the media have made quite a bit of drama around "drones" to which they are referring to quadcopter and its variants.   I have been in the radio controlled hobby for years now and I get upset with the negative publicity because of the sheer amount of ignorance and fear involved.  I feel that my project can help shed a positive light on quadcopters and show that my quadcopter can be truly be called a drone.  It  will not present any threat to anyone of their privacy.  It will show a positive use of a quadcopter and that they really only do exactly what we well them.

Synopsis:

I will build an automated security guard quadcopter called a QuadCop that will allow one to manually fly the quadcopter and record waypoint macros for play them back later.  The waypoint macros are a series of GPS coordinates and other information that is recorded while manually flying the QuadCop.  This will allows the QuadCop to fly around obstacles in a small area and perform security checks using a variety of sensors.  Sensors include motion detectors, sound recorders, and flame detectors.  The QuadCop will be able to land and will be on a timer to go perform security checks at regular intervals.  The QuadCop will have the ability to record photos and send text messages or emails upon certain events.  Bright LEDs will be used to scare intruders away as well as pre-recorded sound bytes.

Prelude

Imaging you love to fly radio control aircraft and you have available a nice flying field to fly at with a runway, clubhouse, storage shed, and all the tools necessary to upkeep the field.  It took years to get the club into this condition.

By nature of the RC hobby, the flying field is located away from civilization for safety reasons.  Further, your club only owns the small acre of land the runway and facilities are on and not the vast fields used as a fly over area.

Unfortunately too many times there has been vandalism at the field.  The tool shed has been broken into and things stolen. The picnic tables have been set a blaze.  Trucks have used your runway and pit area for a mud track.  Putting up a fence around the whole area is impossible and would not help the too often need to go retrieve a downed aircraft out in the fields.

Imagine you now have the option to have a security guard at your field that is active during the non- flying hours.  This security guard is called the QuadCop. 

To setup the QuadCop, you only had to manually fly it around your field, and show it how to navigate around the buildings and the trees.  Using a couple of switches on your transmitter, you can tell the QuadCop to start recording the flight path you are flying it through.  Another switch will signal to it that when it reaches these coordinates to do a sensor sweep in a 360 degree turn.  The smart algorithms it has programmed into it allow it to connect your flight paths so it can navigate them in a random pattern.

You can point the sensors at the runway, the picnic tables, or even the club house.  The sensors include motion detectors, flame sensors, and cameras.  The QuadCop even has a “scare mode” where it can activate an on board speaker to give the trespassers a warning, shine high candle power LEDs onto the intruders, taking their pictures and recording their voices. 

Your club has a WiFi connection so the QuadCop and send email and text messages about what it is detecting.  Another club using the QuadCop opted to get a $35 per month smart phone to give the QuadCop 4G access since no WiFi exists.

The QuadCop has a roomy area to land on top of your clubhouse where it protected from the elements and theft.  It uses a sonic sensor to sense the landing pad for a comfy landing.  A future enhancement will become available, the QuadCop base station which will shield the QuadCop, recharge it and download its data for safer keeping. 

For now, the QuadCop can run for days without a charge due to its large Lithium Polymer (LIPO) batteries.  Built in safety features are designed to keep things safe, and in catastrophic failure such as long term loss of GPS the QuadCop simply shuts down.

A web interface allows you to configure the landing points and boundaries for the QuadCop as well as emails, texts and other important settings.  The setup the times of operation and how often to perform checks are also configured here.

You may or may not scare the thieves away, but you now have their pictures and you were able to get out the field before they got away too far.  Justice now has a chance.

In another case the intruders were scared off and no damage was done.  The video the QuadCop recorded was played back on the local news to give everyone some good entertainment.

Testing and programming has begun.  I will be replacing the RPi B with the RPi 2 when I get it.  The Arduino micro will be replaced with the pro mini, it is just used for convenience for now while I test code.