Working Principles

Sockets

We connected to Pluto first by connecting our device to the drone’s hotspot, then we used TCP sockets to connect to the drone using IPV4 scheme and socket library in python to do the same. The server iss hosted at 192.168.4.1:23 We sent the MSP Packet data encoded as bytes to pluto using sockets, the details about the packet is explained below.

MSP Packets

We used MSP Packet scheme to communicate with Pluto, ie send commands, request data and calibrate the drone. The data of the packet was first encoded into bytes and then sent as a byte stream (array of bytes) to the drone. The basic structure of the packet has been explained below.

Structure of the Packet

Header	Direction	Message Length	Type of Payload	Message Data	Checksum
2 Bytes	1 Byte	1 Byte	1 Byte	N Bytes	1 Byte

Details of the Packet

Type of Byte	ASCII	Hexadecimal
Header	$M	0x24 0x4d
Direction	‘<’ or ‘>’	0x3c (to the drone) or 0x3e (from the drone)
Message Length		0x00 - 0xff
Type of Payload		0x01 - 0xff
Payload		Message Body encoded into N bytes
Checksum		XOR of Bytes of “Msg length”, “Command” and all bytes of “Payload”