Update: This blog post provides more information on how Solo Toolkit works

Solo Toolkit

A desktop-based collection of utilities for the 3DR Solo drone.

Motivation

The 3DR Solo is a great drone for development. However, changing firmware versions, pulling logs, and performing other tasks on Solo typically involves using SSH and tedious command line tools. Solo Toolkit exposes much of this functionality using Electron, a cross-plaform desktop application framework. This enables both developers and casual users to modify and maintain their Solo.

A note about cross-plaform capability

Electron enables cross-platform development, and Solo Toolkit is technically capable of running on multiple platforms. However, all development thus far has been done on macOS and more development is needed to run Solo Toolkit on Linux and Windows.

One of the main barriers to running on Windows it the heavy reliance on SSH. SSH2, the node library used by Solo Toolkit, can leverage Cygwin or Putty to make this work, but this hasn't been implemented or tested. Linux and Windows support are on the roadmap (see below).

Getting Started

If you don't have node

macOS

brew install node

Install global dependencies:

Electron

npm install electron-prebuilt -g

Gulp

npm install gulp -g

App dependencies

npm install

Run in a dev environment

npm run dev

Roadmap

Solo Toolkit is very much a work in progress. Below are a list of upcoming features to be added. The list is mostly a collection of ideas and is not necessarily prioritized.

UI/app work

• Windows support
• Linux support
• Add tests
• Add system notifications to notify user if app is backgrounded/minimized
• Firmware server integration (to enable download of Solo firmware from 3DR like Â[solo-cli]() does)
• Log plotting and analysis tools

Solo related features

• Ability to change control modes for international users
• Mavlink integration (using node-mavlink)
• Arming and motor testing
• Level calibration
• Accel calibration

Packaging the app

Solo Toolkit leverages [electron-packager]() to create runnable .app packages. To package the app for distribution, run npm run clean and npm run package. If you'd like to include Chrome dev tools in the resulting package for debugging, run npm run package-dev.

The package version is derived from the version specified in package.json.