Flying Drones with Google Assistant
I’m glad so many people enjoyed my post on Flying Drones with Code. A few people at Upstart enjoyed the post and asked me to come and present the drone coding experience at one of our lunch ‘n learn sessions in the office. This turned out to be a lot of fun (you can see a quick video of our final result here…). However, one of my colleagues said she was bringing her kids in to see the project — and that they already tried the basics but wanted to “learn from the pro.”
Uh oh. I’m definitely not a pro — so I decided I needed to add another element to the original drone flying project so that we could teach the kids something. And the something we added, was using Google Assistant to kick off our drone demo. This was easier than I though — and frankly most of the challenges are in the networking arena — especially making sure we could get a static IP for my Raspberry Pi at the office. So, if you’ve ever wanted to say “Hey Google, launch drone demo” and see a drone take off, do some flips, and land— keep reading to see how we did it…
Step 0: Drone Setup
The easiest thing to do here is to read my original post on how we set up our Mambo drone to be remotely controlled by a small Raspberry Pi. It’s not too complicated, but I won’t repeat it all here.
Step 1: Write your fun drone demo
This is the easy part. I decided that for my “drone demo” I would just have it do some crazy flips and then land. So, I created a simple drone_demo.py file to execute this. Here’s what I used:
from Mambo import Mambo# we got this address by running 'sudo python findMambo.py'
mamboAddr = "YOUR MAMBO ADDRESS"# make a mambo object. we need to se use_wifi to false as our Mambo does not have wifi
my_mambo = Mambo(mamboAddr, use_wifi=False)# connect to our mambo drone
print("trying to connect")
success = my_mambo.connect(num_retries=3)
if(not success) exit()my_mambo.safe_takeoff(3)
my_mambo.fly_direct(roll=0, pitch=100, yaw=0, vertical_movement=0, duration=.5)
my_mambo.smart_sleep(2)
my_mambo.flip(direction='front')
my_mambo.smart_sleep(2)
my_mambo.flip(direction='back')
my_mambo.smart_sleep(2)
my_mambo.turn_degrees(180)
my_mambo.smart_sleep(2)
my_mambo.fly_direct(roll=0, pitch=100, yaw=0, vertical_movement=0, duration=.5)
my_mambo.smart_sleep(2)
my_mambo.turn_degrees(180)
my_mambo.smart_sleep(2)
my_mambo.safe_land(3)# disconnect when we are done
my_mambo.disconnect()
Step 2: Set up Node-RED
Node RED is a simple web server really intended for IOT projects. However, it’s perfect for our purposes here as it allows us to accept a simple HTTP request on our Raspberry Pi and then execute a command. My Raspberry Pi came with Node-RED already installed, so I just had to run it. That was easy to do from my main menu bar. Once the server is running, you can open up a browser (I used Chromium) and head over to http://127.0.0.1:1880/.
You should see a screen like this:
Node-RED allows you to build flows with inputs that cause actions. We want to create a flow that starts with an http request and executes a command. So, grab the http object from the Input section and drop it into the flow. Then grab the exec object from the Advanced section and add it to the flow as well. Finally, in order to help with any problems, grab the debug object from the Output section. You can then connect the right side of the http object to the left side of the exec object. I also connected the right side of both the http and exec objects to the left side of the debug object — so I can see any error messages (it ends up being a lot — but helpful). Once the flow is configured, it should look about like this:
Now we need to configure each object. First, let’s set up the http object to accept a GET request to /drone_demo. Just double click on the object and enter the right values:
Getting the exec command right is a bit harder. Here we are just trying to execute the proper command. However, I found that if I tried to use a relative location for the file it would have an error with the Mambo import. I also found the need to use the nohup command to prevent the exec module from stopping when I had my first smart sleep command. Here’s the command I used and an example of the configured screen:
nohup python /home/ryan/pyparrot/drone_demo.py
Once this is all set up, you should be able to execute the drone demo by pinging the appropriate address: http://127.0.0.1:1880/drone_demo. Check it out!
Step 3: Port Forwarding
Now that we have a web server running and accepting requests that can execute our drone code, we’ve done the most interesting (and easier) part. Now we need to connect it up to our Google Home. First of all, we need to make our Raspberry Pi accessible from the public internet so that it can talk to Google Home. This is generally done through something called Port Forwarding — which allows us to take our home internet’s single public IP and tell it to route all requests to a specific port (in this case 1880) to a specific internal machine (in this case our Raspberry Pi). I configured this in my Eero setup by going to Network Settings -> Advanced Settings -> Reservations and Port Forwarding -> Add a reservation.
At this stage, we also need to find the public IP address for you home network so that we can configure the final step of the process — connecting our setup to Google Home.
Step 4: IFTTT
IFTTT (If This Then Than) is a great tool here because it provides a pre-built integration into Google Home (this integration is actually why I built this project using Google Home and not Amazon Alexa. First, you will need to connect the Google Assistant service to IFTTT. This should ask you to sign in to your Google Account and grant access. Then switch over and choose “New Applet”. Your If will be Google Assistant. You will need to specify the words you want to use to launch the demo. I picked “execute drone demo.” It just sounded cool.
You’re that will be a Web Request. You will need to point it to your public address with the appropriate URL and a basic GET method.
http://YOUR_IP_ADDRESS:1880/drone_demo
Step 5: Run the demo!
At this point, when you say “Hey Google, execute drone demo” — your drone should take off, dance around, and return to land! Of course, there’s usually a bunch of trouble shooting that goes along with this stage. It certainly took me a while to get this working — and even longer when I brought the Google Home into the office and had to get port forwarding working on our internal network! However, it worked pretty well and everyone was duly impressed
What’s Next
This project was a lot of fun, but it got me thinking about what else we could do with our little drone project. For instance, we could have IFTTT capture multiple commands and be able to control the drone in real time “Hey Google, fly drone forward” etc. Might be fun to try out. Maybe I’ll give it a shot when I find a bit more free time.
If you do decide to give this project a shot — I’d love to hear about your results. And if you have any difficulties getting it working, let me know and I’ll see if I have any advice. Enjoy!
