A Drone Object is the representation of your drone in the API. Every drone object is a unique drone that API requests can be made to gather telemetry information, send commands to, etc. You can think of drone objects as the API’s representation of your physical or virtual drone.
Drone Objects can be created in two ways. First, any physical drone, such as a Luci, that is activated through DS Link properly, will automatically create a drone object associated with that Luci to your account. Secondly, you may create a virtual drone and corresponding object, by using the Virtual Drone API.
Anatomy of a drone object
Every drone object contains the following metadata.
_id
The ID field is a unique identifier for a drone object. You can use this as a way to query your drone. Each ID is a string of 24 serialized letters and numbers.
name
The name is a string that serves as an alias for your drone object, making it easier to work with. Your name must be unique for all of your drone objects on your account.
simId
If your drone is a virtual drone (see Virtual Drones below) then your drone object will have this field, which serves a unique Id for virtual drones. In general, the simId is not important to the end user, however you can use it as a convenient way of determining if your drone object is tied to a real or virtual drone.
created
A UTC date of when this drone object was created.
updated
A UTC date of when this drone object was last modified. Keep in mind this is when the drone object was modified, not the actual drone.
systemId
Represents the drone object’s MAVLink ID number. Is 1 by default. Generally does not need to be modified.
online
True if the drone is currently communicating with the API, false otherwise.
type
Is “Drone” when the drone object represents a physical drone. Is “Virtual Drone” when the drone object represents a virtual drone. You are free modify this type field for your own needs, such as classifying swarm drone groups.
firmwareId
A unique Id generated by physical drones from DS Link. This is “unknown” on virtual drones.
missions
A list of mission objects that your drone has uploaded. See Mission Objects for more details.
sensors
A set of user-defined sensors with their values. These allow users to upload their own custom sensor information, either locally from their drone using DS Link, or from another source. See User Defined Sensors section.
groups
An array of strings of groups the drone is associated with. Groups serve as easy ways to logically organize drones.
A set of user-defined sensors with their values. These allow users to upload their own custom sensor information, either locally from their drone using DS Link, or from another source. See User Defined Sensors section.
groups
An array of strings of groups the drone is associated with. Groups serve as easy ways to logically organize drones.