This book is for anyone who wants to build a drone, but he needs to be good at programming and electronics if he wants to build smart drones. 

Chapter 1, Things to Know Before You Build a Drone, discusses all the basic ideas about drones, how you can identify them, what types of things are required to make drones, and explains a lot of preliminary ideas.

Chapter 2, Assembling Your Drone, helps you to start assembling our drone, install the modules to the drone, and get a very basic drone ready for flying. You'll also learn some aerodynamics regarding the flying of a drone. You'll learn some tricks to avoid crashing your drone in this chapter too.

Chapter 3, Preparing Your Drone for Flying, helps you to prepare your quadcopter for flight. We will learn how to calibrate some sensors and modes for the ArduPilot. In the end of the chapter, you'll learn how to configure the ESP8266 module and work with the mobile application.

Chapter 4, Building a Follow Me Drone, enables you to build a Follow Me drone and modify the control of the drone via some mobile applications. You'll also learn how to configure GPS with your ESP8266.

Chapter 5, Building a Mission Control Drone, teaches you how to make a mission control drone and perform a survey or deliver a package. You will also get an idea of how to implement some sensors to make the mission control drone more efficient.

Chapter 6, Building a Drone to Take Selfies and Record Videos, helps you build an octocopter and then use it to take selfies. You'll also use a customized gimbal and control it with the ESP8266 and mobile applications.

Chapter 7, Building Prototype Drones – Gliding Drones, teaches a number of things related to aerodynamics and designing a fixed wing drone. You'll learn how to use your ArduPilot for the glider at the end of the chapter. The physics behind flying will be explained in this chapter using simple mathematics.

Chapter 8, Building Prototype Drones – Racing Drone, shows how you can make a racing drone and get it ready for flying in a race. You'll also see how to tweak the obstacles using ESP8266 at the end of the chapter.

Chapter 9, Maintaining and Troubleshooting Your Drone, explains how to maintain your drone, and if your drone gets into any problems, how to troubleshoot them. In this chapter, you'll also learn some rules and regulations for flying drones.

The drones you will build throughout this book will require a strong programming and electronics background. You will need to use Arduino IDE to upload the code to your ESP8266 and Arduino boards. For flashing the ESP8266, you will need to use the ESP flasher and the proper .bin files. A good working knowledge of C, C++, Python, and Lua will be required to play with the modules discussed in this book. You'll use Mission Planner, along with mobile applications such as Blynk, Tower, and DroidPlanner 2. If you know the AT commands for serial communication, it would be great.

Blynk.begin(auth, ssid, pass); //This will start the Blynk with proper credentials
pinMode(4, OUTPUT); //for trigger in D1
pinMode(5, INPUT); //for echo in D2

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