The MeCam is a $49 quadrotor without a remote control--It can either be controlled via voice commands, or you can put it in "follow me" mode.
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The MeCam is a $49 quadrotor without a remote control--It can either be controlled via voice commands, or you can put it in "follow me" mode.
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Hey John Check out my new Page on Diydrones and New Mini heli video I'm trying to incorporate the voice control into my Heli and would love your help so I'm ready for Part 2 of my podcast next Wednesday.
Drone Cafe Video Podcast - Permanent Page
According to the gizmodo story, http://gizmodo.com/5979208/this-tiny-pet-quadcopter-could-be-your-o...
it sounds like they're just squatting on the patent idea without actually making it work. They want to charge anyone who makes it work a license fee.
Supposedly they're using a Cortex A9 onboard, which is perfectly capable of running simple vision routines. If you're clever about your algorithms (and especially if you have a NEON MPE you can leverage), it's doable.
It won't, of course, perfectly track anyone all the time. But humans have difficulty doing that too :)
Remember that they're looking for someone to license the tech, so I'm guessing $49 is not the retail price.
There is a wireless camera that small, but purely analog. It wouldn't work with a phone.
http://www.helipal.com/walkera-qr-ladybird-fpv-2-4ghz-green-edition...
Jack, have you seen the AR.Drone's camera? It looks like it's probably 1.5x the size of the one from the MeCam photos in each dimension, and it came out what, three years ago?
If only there was really a wifi camera that small.
Yeah, I'm assuming the phone is doing the speech recognition. I've done voice control of a drone, and even when doing recognition on the phone the noise of the motors when it's within 20-30 feet is still a problem (though I was using larger motors).
I could almost believe it, but the video seems like a spoof. I think the price-point seems right for just the board+cpu, but adding motors+camera+lipo to that would add another 25-30 dollars. I think the biggest "umm, no" for me, is how do you cancel out the noise of the motors AND the airflow from an onboard microphone well enough to do speech recognition, the CPU cycles required to noise cancel would be a LOT, not to mention different pitches for all 4 motors, so I would assume the voice recognition is either really poor, OR its using an app on your phone, and then even with processing offloaded to the phone, BTLE doesnt have enough BW for video, and having a wifi peering with video would kill a small lipo battery too quickly to be viable.
I did say "smoke test", not "impossible". :) I think though many of us raise an eyebrow at using the wrong conjugation of the verb "to be", specifically using the present tense form "is" when the future or conditional tenses are more appropriate.
Everything about it seems within a factor of two-doable to me. Does something about it strike you as obviously not doable at that price?
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