Some Good News

Well, relatively speaking. It turns out that Emotiv had some problems with their shipping company raising prices, which left some packages stranded and others in a backlog in their factory. They only recently discovered the degree of the problem, and have transferred to a different shipping company they've had better luck with in the past to clear out their backlog. Hopefully this means I'll have my headset shipped in the next few days and have it here to work with over the break. It would have been nice to use it in testing while I was here during the semester, but I'll take the small favors where they're granted.

The backbone of this project is pretty well put together at this point. It's looking like most of what I'm going to need to do is hooking up the headset to my software and then doing a lot of fine-tuning on various aspects including the flight stabilization I mentioned in a previous post and the detection thresholds on the headset's readings. As usually seems to happen, the stuff I thought was going to be complicated turned out to be fairly simple. The complicated stuff is a whole list of steps that I didn't know were even a part of the project when I set out to do it!

Regardless, this project should make for an entertaining semester, and I have to keep reminding myself that at the end of it, I'm going to have a helicopter I can fly with my mind! How cool is that?

And Failure

Coming off the high of last week, I'm experiencing a bit of a low right now as it pertains to this project. it has past the two week estimate for the outside length of time it should take a headset to ship and it seems mine still hasn't. I'm hoping that there isn't a problem with the product stock because of holiday sales, though I can't imagine this is an especially popular Christmas present.

On the more immediate home front, I also have an issue that has come up with the library I'm using to control the drone. Apparently, much of its flight stabilizing behavior is part of the control apps, rather than native to the drone's on-board firmware. This means that hover has a few kinks, as the drone drifts a bit more than it should, and it doesn't compensate for things like wind when being controlled via the computer. Apparently, I'm going to have to program this functionality into my control program myself. Oh well, it couldn't be smooth sailing the whole way through this project.

Successes

This project is actually coming along significantly better than I'd anticipated it would. "Mind-controlled helicopter" is not something that I'd thought would go this smoothly from the outset, but so far things are coming along really well.

Emotiv's headset apparently takes a while to ship, but in the meantime, I've discovered that they provide a free emulator, so I can use that to test my code. I was a bit concerned that transferring commands from the Emotiv software to the OSC converter, then to the Processing sketch and from there to the AR.Drone would wind up being an overly complicated process, but I actually wound up figuring it out in about fifteen minutes, twenty on the outside.

I can now successfully use the Emotiv software to tell my drone to take off and land. I'm excited for the headset to arrive so I can really get this thing working.