Monthly Archives: January 2017

Analytics, Cognitive Services, Drone, Internet Of Things

The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 4

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Introduction to the Drone Journey

Cognitive Services

This post is the fourth post in documenting the steps I went through on my journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. There are 4 other posts building up to this one which you can find at the end of this post.

Focus of this post

In this post I am going to pick-up where we left off and cover how you can:

  • Install the packages you need to access Microsoft Cognitive Services from node.js
  • Understand some of the capabilities of Microsoft Cognitive Services
  • Start to see how the face API can be used from node.js
  • Understand how to use the ImageMagick library (thanks to the tip from Lukas) to annotate the images that come back with the faces in node.js

Adding Intelligence To The Drone

In this part of the project we start to add some intelligence to our drone. We will do that using Microsoft Cognitive Services. There is a great introduction in this YouTube video which I encourage you to take a look at.

For this demo the primary APIs we will use are the Face API and the Speech APIs so I will focus there over the next few posts.

Continue reading The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 4 →

Drone, Internet Of Things

The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 3

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Introduction to the Drone Journey

Application Framework

This post is the fourth post in documenting the steps I went through on my journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. There are 3 other posts building up to this one which you can find at the end of this post.

Focus of this post

In this post I am going to pick-up where we left off and cover how you can:

  • Develop a better looking web page to control the drone and add  a few additional control capabilities
  • Grab PNG images from the drone camera and feed them back to a web page for real-time viewing

Continue reading The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 3 →

Drone, Internet Of Things, IoT

The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 2

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Introduction to the Drone Journey

Part 2

This post is the third post in Journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. If you have stumbled across this I encourage you to read the following two posts first (otherwise this will not make a lot of sense):

Focus of this post

In this post I am going to pick-up where we left off and cover how you can:

  • Control the drone via a node.js application when your computer and the drone are both on the drones default wireless network
  • Install express to setup  simple web server in node-js land
  • Build a basic web application to control the drone using express js
  • Hack the drone so that it can operate on the same WPA2 secured wireless network where you have Internet access (need this for Cognitive Services)

Continue reading The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 2 →

Drone, Internet Of Things

The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 1

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Introduction to the Drone Journey

Laying The Groundwork

This post is the first one covering my step-by-step journey to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone. It is inspired by the post from Lukas Biewald I referenced in my introduction blog post. If you follow this entire series (warning – there are 10 more pots coming up) you will be able to completely replicate what I have built.

As a hacker I am sure there are better and more efficient ways to do some of the coding I will show. If you make things better let me know and I am happy to create a “making things better” blog!

Assumptions

My starting point in this post assumes a few things:

  1. That you have bough a Parrot AR drone 2.0. This is the one I bought.
  2. That you have checked the drone works using one of the supplied apps and that you can see its wireless network from your windows computer.
  3. That you have got a machine running the anniversary edition of windows. Most people have that by now but if you are not sure this post might help.
  4. You have access to a wireless network
  5. You know the name and password of your secured wireless network (I assume WPA2 security).
  6. You can assign a static IP address for your wireless network.

Focus of this post

In this “long” post I am going to cover:

  • The basics of getting node.js installed on your windows computer.
  • Getting the BASH shell installed on your windows computer.
  • Installing a node.js library to interact with the drone
  • Connecting our computer to the wireless network of the drone and control it via an interactive session of node.js.

Continue reading The Voice-Controlled, Face Recognizing, Drone Journey – Part 1 →

Analytics, Cognitive Services, Drone

Building an autonomous, voice-controlled face recognizing drone

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The inspiration

Our world, and the technology landscape that is helping to fuel it, are changing at a staggering pace. With nearly 20 years in the IT industry the only constant I have had to handle is change.

Many years ago I resolved to ensure I was learning on all levels and, while possible, that includes keeping my hands near the tools of the transformation. The technology!

The quote above really sums up why twice a year I try to find a side project that lets me dive deep into selective technology I have not used much previously. I do that so that I can “touch” it. That in turn enables me understand it, and how it might be useful, better.

I value such periods. The time spent on such projects helps me when it comes to my day to day job of helping steer the business and helping companies transform through the use of new technologies.

With that in mind, in the run up to Christmas, I was looking around for my next project.  It was then I stumbled across a blog post from October 2016 by Lukas Biewald. The blog post was entitled “How to build an autonomous, voice-controlled, face recognizing drone for $200“. I knew immediately I had found my next project.

Drone Intro

Continue reading Building an autonomous, voice-controlled face recognizing drone →