Design and build land, air, and sea drones using Ardupilot with Pixhawk 2.1 About This Book * Explore the best practices used by the top industry professionals that will not only help you build drones in time, but also build effective solutions to cater to. * Navigate through the complexities of Ardupilot to put together a complete functional UAV and assemble your drone * Learn through practical examples that help you build robust UAV flight and ground control components Who This Book Is For The primary audience for this book is anyone (enthusiasts and hobbyists) who dream of building their own drones. It will also help those who are trying to build UAVs for commercial purposes. Some prior experience with microcontrollers and electronics would be useful. What You Will Learn * Kitbash "dumb" objects into smart ones * Program Pixhawk for your drones * Fabricate your own parts out of different materials * Integrate Pixhawk into different types of drones * Build and understand the significant difference between land, sea, and air drones * Adapt old Pixhawk sensors to the new Pixhawk 2.1 plugs * Become familiar with procedures for testing your new drones In Detail The Ardupilot platform is an application ecosystem that encompasses various OS projects for drone programming, flight control, and advanced functionalities.The Ardupilot platform supports many Comms and APIs, such as DroneKit, ROS, and MAVLink. It unites OS drone projects to provide a common codebase. With the help of this book, you will have the satisfaction of building a drone from scratch and exploring its many recreational uses (aerial photography, playing, aerial surveillance, and so on). This book helps individuals and communities build powerful UAVs for both personal and commercial purposes. You will learn to unleash the Ardupilot technology for building, monitoring, and controlling your drones.This is a step-by-step guide covering practical examples and instructions for assembling a drone, building ground control unit using microcontrollers, QgroundControl, and MissionPlanner. You can further build robotic applications on your drone utilizing critical software libraries and tools from the ROS framework. With the help of DroneKit and MAVLink (for reliable communication), you can customize applications via cloud and mobile to interact with your UAV. Style and approach Step-by-step instructions to help assemble your first drone with the Ardupilot platform.

Build rich, high production value mobile games and distribute them across different platforms with Buildbox About This Book * Create captivating 2D & 2.5D (isometric) video games for all platforms * Leverage Buildbox to monetize and prepare your games for distribution * This step-by-step tutorial will get you generating complex and media rich games with no coding experience Who This Book Is For This book caters to those who have an interest or desire to create their own mobile games either as a hobbyist or who are looking to enhance their skills as a professional games developer. No coding experience is required. What You Will Learn * Create the illusion of a 3D background in your game using parallax * Add advanced controls and obstacles to our first world * Develop assets (graphic and audio) for the Buildbox engine * Design games based on the capabilities and limitations of Buildbox and their target platforms * Compile and distribute video games on various channels such as Steam, iOS store, Android stores, and the Mac App Store * Optimize your games to get the absolute best quality within platform restrictions * Conquer common issues experienced with Buildbox development In Detail Buildbox is an "any skill level" development platform to develop video games with no coding experience. It also exports these games to be compiled for any platform (from Windows to Mac to iOS to Android and Blackberry) all using the same graphic user interface. Using an example as a tutorial, we will relate the driving principles and you'll see how you can implement these principles to develop any games on the platform. We begin by setting expectations and providing a brief overview of the software. But it's not long before you "dive in" to creating your first video game. You will actually have a playable level ("world") by the end of the second chapter. Later on, you'll learn everything from basic graphics creation to advanced world design while you refine your first game, called "Ramblin' Rover." All along the way, you will see how certain functions could be used in tandem to create other types of games; hoping to spark imagination. We will follow the principles and process of monetization through ads and in-game rewards. Lastly, we will go through the process of exporting, compiling, and preparing your storefront to sell the games you will eventually create. Style and approach This book follows a tutorial-based approach that teaches through examples, while also providing the necessary principles to enable you to abstract these principles into any game you want to make.

This book is for a wide range of individuals who are looking to shoot aerial footage with a multicopter. No previous flying experience is assumed, but even the most expert flyers will find unexpected and interesting information.