Remote Control

You may be wondering how to use the keyboard to control CoDrone. In the first activity, you will learn how to use your spacebar to turn on your CoDrone LEDs. First, set your arm and eye LEDs to blue with brightness 1 to turn the LED’s “off”.

Since you want your program to constantly check if you are pressing a key, you will need to implement a forever loop. For this example, use a repeat loop block and connect an “is code running?” block from the status checkers menu.

Now it’s time to check for keyboard input! Remember that when a program needs to make a decision, you should use a conditional statement. Go to the logic menu and grab a conditional block. In the keyboard menu, grab a “When backspace key press” block. From the drop-down menu, select “spacebar”.

If the spacebar is pressed, you want your CoDrone LEDs to turn on. Else, turn them off by resetting the value of the interval back to 1.

You will need to add a wait block after the conditional statement. This is because if you press and hold the spacebar, you will be sending multiple messages to CoDrone. A delay of 50 milliseconds (0.5 seconds) will be enough to prevent CoDrone from disconnecting.

If you want to check for multiple key presses, you will need to include an else if statement for each new key.

Now that you have the basic idea, instead of changing LEDs, you will be adding flight commands! Start a new file and set up the structure of the five conditional statements you will use for forward, backward, left, right, and emergency stop. 

Next, add in your flight commands. In this controller, you will move in corresponding directions for half a second. If the spacebar is pressed, the drone should emergency stop and exit out of the forever loop. If no key is being pressed, the drone should hover.

Activity: Obstacle Course 

Now that you have your new flight controller, build an obstacle course and try to fly to the finish line without hitting anything! If you need to, adjust the values of the delays and add more keys for more functionality!