I noticed that DJI offers an extensive SDK for their drones and it would be fantastic to be able to link it to HA. For example, it would be helpful to launch the drone on a hot spot mission upon motion detection by a camera… You get the idea.
Is there any existing implementation? I couldn’t find anything.
Thanks
Chris
Haha awesome idea! I’m also interested, because that would be epic.
I have been playing with the idea for a while. The scenario I had in mind was to have the drone mission launched on person detection by Frigate if the alarm is on, and the footage streamed to the SAN with snapshots emailed to me.
I was frankly surprised there is no integration. The API seems quite rich and the mission can be defined fairly simply. The practical problem I have is the take-off and landing zone: it needs to be out of reach for the intruder.
I would be flying a DJI Mavic 2 Zoom.
If you guys are interested in pooling brain resources, I am in
Very interested. I would have a different use case to do some custom, planned flyover on the Winery property triggered seasonly and based on sun or tastings.
I started putting something together in terms of scenario, goals and strawman architecture on acato/dji_hass: Integration to launch DJI drone missions through Home Assistant (github.com) - We can get all together there and see how far we can go.
There are two major hurdles I can see. One is practical - the SDK does not exist for python or a linux-based environment, but only for iOS/Android and for Windows and is focused on client apps. I don’t have a good solution for this short of having a Windows box or an Android appliance acting as a middleman between the drone and HA. The second one is legal - recreational drone flying (at least in the US) requires continuous line of sight form the pilot. We can stretch the concept of pilot, I think and have a camera trained on the drone as the proof that line of sight is maintained.
I wanted to come up with a way of creating a timelapse of our property from way up high… So “scheduling” the drone to fly up and take a snapshot from the same place each time would be cool…
I can imaging a little hangar slot in the side of our shed roof that it can fly in and out of… Would need to tackle recharging too?
I went down a rabbit hole on how to come up with an autonomous inspection drone that could scan my yard by schedule or other trigger, which led me to this thread.
Seems that in order to make this feasible at all, you need the drone always ready to go. Before any HA integration, you’d need a wireless charging pad or something for the drone to take off and land from and keep it charged without intervention.
I’ve only found one product that seems to meet this need by a Chinese company called Heisha. They focus on wireless drone charging solutions for commercial or fleet needs. The DPAD 60 looks feasible but seems to be very developer focused (this is where HA would come in) and doesn’t appear to be available to purchase online. Assume you’d have to contact them directly. Cost looks to be ~$850 from one link I found.
My thought was to put something like this in a weather proof enclosure that opens and closes before and after the drone runs a mission.
I don’t plan to pursue this sci-fi dream any further, but wanted to leave this info here for anyone interested.
Thanks a lot, this looks very interesting! Another piece of the puzzle…