Drone Racer is a project primarily developed for the DroneFest organized as part of the FabLab Festival 2015. Its aim is to provide an all-in-one interface for races organizers to:

• create different events for drones competition;
• register contestants and their associated drones;
• classify drones into categories;
• create several routes with their own set of rules for each event;
• setup and monitor races on a designated route;
• gather statistics on races for drivers, event or kind of route.

This project is targeted for raspberry pi where input data for drone along the race will be provided on the GPIO port. Data readers are however extensible to provide additional support.

To reduce the overhead of having extraneous services for database access, Drone Racer makes use of the python's built-in sqlite module. It uses it to store informations on the contestants, the drones, the different type of routes and the races leaderboards.

Additionally, setup, updates & leaderboard for each race can be sent to a REST API for the audience.

• Python GObject Introspection
• Font Awesome
• Some images under resources/img that are not provided under version control.

• pySerial
• python-xbee

• tornado

The software ships with 2 different data readers. Each reader should server as an interface between signals sent from gates and the internal representation needed by the software.

Provided readers are an StdInReader that converts input from the command line and an XBeeReader that expects data coming with the ZigBee protocol on a serial port.

It is easy to provide any other kind of reader, given the following constraints:

• it is recommended that the reader is a subclass of threading.Thread;
• as such, it has to provide a start() method;
• a stop() method should be implemented for cleanup purposes;
• the constructor must accept a callback method as unique parameter.

The callback method is a two parameters function that must be called each time a drone passes by a gate. The first parameter is the gate identification letter (or letters if there are more than 26 gates) and the second parameters is the 0-based drone identification number.

Other than that, readers can be implemented freely and expect any kind of input data.

Drone Racer is built with the ability to send satuses about races to a REST API (e.g. for the contestants and the audience to bo able to follow the races).

For cases where it is not possible to provide a REST + WebSocket API on a dedicated server, Drone Racer is shipped with a setup of a tornado web server. This web server can easily be used on a LAN and provide as much visual feedback as provided on the Gtk UI.

Edit the local_server.settings.Settings attributes to adapt it to your needs.