DJ Drone

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Architecture & Design

DJ Drone System Architecture

The DJ Drone system is made up of four primary components: the onboard computer, the air traffic controller, the user application, and the admin web interface. These four components are joined together by a MySQL database that stores all information about the system. Read more about each individual component on their respective pages.

Design Decisions

We chose a database system to join the four components so that we could ensure that all components are synchronized. Originally we wanted to use Firebase as our database, since it provides easy real-time synchronization by default. However Firebase databases can only be hosted in the cloud, and we were concerned about the risk of unreliable wifi connections at the flying field where we tested our system (especially with drones in the air, farther away from the access point). We opted for MySQL because it can be hosted locally and supports multiple connections/threads accessing data at once (a necessity for our other system components).

When choosing a speaker system for the drone, our primary concern was to pick a speaker that was loud enough to be heard over the rotors of the drone, but also was light enough to be lifted into the air by a drone with a maximum total payload of 400g. Our original speaker choice, while very loud, was much too heavy for the drone, and we had to switch to a lighter one.