This weekend I set about adding some bright LED strips to the front of my AR Drone's indoor hull. The large curved strips of foam seemed like the perfect testbed for adding some night time lighting to my drone.

The lights

I started with an LED strip that I bought from Amazon; these things are great, they run on just 12v, and can be cut into any length so long as the number of LEDs in the strip is a multiple of three.

Being careful to position the strip so that the LEDs wouldn't blind the drone's camera, and that they would include a nice curve to each side, I worked out roughly how long I wanted one piece. Where to cut was dictated by the convenient dotted line placed between every three LEDs. Cutting along this line provides convenient contacts to either solder to, or use small crimping connectors.

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I'm no expert in the dynamics of flight, but I'm fairly certain that the props are supposed to turn.

Last week my AR Drone took a nose dive into the curb of a pavement, before pirouetting through the air to land on its feet. It's not uncommon for the drone to bounce around a little if it crashes with an odd angle, the flexible props usually bounce it harmlessly off walls, etc.

As the drone sat there I thought how lucky I was that it finished on its feet, and that I didn't need to go flipping it over again. I presses the Take Off button and watched as three of the four props turned, realising there was a problem I stabbed for the Emergency cut off button, but not before it flipped itself over and onto its back.

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This weekend I had my first success getting the Sony LiveView to do anything other than switch on and show "00:00". Ever since I bought the LiveView in early 2012, I've been checking in on the progress of various groups that have been trying to hack it.

The LiveView was an appealing gadget to tinker with. Nearing it's retirement many sites were selling it cheap, for example I picked mine up for just £12 from play.com.

With a little help from a python script written by Andrew de Quincey, I managed to get the watch running. I was able to control the LED, feedback button presses, and send message and menu data. I still haven't managed to get images to send, but it's only a matter of time.

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