Happy Birthday TelloFPV!
Actually a few days late, this thread was started on 12-16-18...
I remember downloading the first available Beta (0.4 I think?).
From beta downloads to a production version in the Play Store in about 6 weeks! (before the end of January 2019)... then, full-featured and mature in about 6 months! (before volate!lo went on holiday in July).
It's been truly fun watching the development from birth, and feature after feature be added and polished - the ones he wanted, and many of those that were asked for by us.
Thank you!! Also thanks to all others for their continued support!
I think you are correct that 0.4 was the first beta.
Actually the first production version was made available on Play Store on the early morning of Dec 24th, around 3am local time and I had to drive 400km to a family gathering for Xmas the next morning :-(
The first license was purchase just an hour later by a guy in Austin, Texas. Must have been someone on the forum
Luckily I added license validation very early in the process, even though it was my first app and I was a bit naive. Otherwise TelloFpv would would be a dead orphaned project by now due to all the piracy going on. Yes, its that bad - just look at aTelloPilot.
But Xmas season is good, as app downloads have gone up again after slowly dropping over several months. Well,
Tello certainly isn't new anymore and this effect is no surprise.
Overall TelloFpv is pretty much feature complete, has good ratings and all is well. There is only one major feature that I still want to implement: Flight path recording and replay, where
Tello follows a known track and the user can focus on rotating
Tello to make good videos.
So its time to get to new shores...and since we are a bit in celebration mood let me spoiler the next app. This time the apple folks will have something to play with.
Actually I am a bit late for Xmas, but this time its not my fault:
The project name is TelloMe !
(OK, the name is not ideal, if you have a better one let me know ASAP!)
Its not a TelloFpv for Apple. Its an app that uses computer vision to make
Tello track & follow almost anything. Nothing else. Just tracking. Sounds simple!
Overall the app will have a very simplified user interface and no features beyond tracking. Maybe I will add a visual "circle me" but thats it. No advanced features, no controller support, no photo mode, no RTH, nothing. Just follow me.
I may be biased but I think its better to keep it
simple focused for the apple users ;-)
It can track a face, or a group of faces.
It can track a person, or a group of persons.
It can track arbitrary objects: you draw a rectangle on the screen around something and
tello hooks onto this.
For groups of faces / persons it tries to track the "weighted visual center" (no clue if there is a real term for this). If say three people are in view walking on the left side of the road and one person on the right,
Tello will track a point more towards the 3 people on the left.
The app is ready for beta testing, but apple is a bit ... "different". They try to keep their walled garden of happiness and boredom clean. There is no reasonable way to distribute test versions except through their distribution mechanisms. So I have to "publish" even for beta testing, and the folks at Apple actually test not only production but also beta versions (seems real humans are doing this !?).
The app was just released to Apple for initial testing but Apple will shutdown their testing teams tomorrow for Xmas. I have no clue how long this process will take or how many rounds I will need to get approval. More so as they may ask me to send in a
Tello drone for testing :-(
The following screenshots are made filming some youtube videos, so picture quality is pretty low. Overall video quality is on par with TelloFpv.
Here is the normal flight interface
The track mode selection
Tracking a person
And an object (OK, its a horse but most other objects don't move slowly enough)
I will create a separate thread once Apple has approved the initial version for beta and someone can actually test it
