This library holds code for communication between different nodes on a UDP network. Please see wikipedia and youtube for information on UDP packets if you are new.
The User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is a structure developed in the early day of the internet to facilitate packet transfer for files that did not require an acknowledge statement after receiving (as opposed to TCP). During development of a wireless mesh network and research into such a structure for a decentralized drone network, I found UDP to be the perfect tool for relaying time-dependent state information. Most of the time, the drones would only need to relay either their position and state information to local neighbors to prevent any crashes. UDP works best here because neighboring drones only care about the most up-to-date information, and if a packet is lost (bad or weak signal) and a new packet is sent, this new packet should replace the lost packet anyways. Furthermore, this assumes that we do not really care about signal loss, as weak signals usually indicate that the drones are not close to each other anyways.
This ReadMe is not intended to familiarize the reader with UDP, but rather to offer insight into the library and reasons for UDP. To learn more about UDP, please refer to the following sources below.
The ESP 8266 is an open-sourced arduino compatible board that has the additional benefit of support WiFi. With this capability and the lack of any inherent security on WiFi networks other than basic password (as opposed to Bluetooth authentication), I choose WiFi to perform a test of the functionality of a wireless mesh network on a drone swarm.
For computer related code (RasPi, Linux/Mac), please refer to the computer_udp folder. To run files, open up terminal on your OS and type
python3 [file_name].py
where file_name is the name of the file you want to run. For example, you would change file_name to raspi_broadcast if you wanted to run it. This will begin to run the code. Please make sure that it is listening on the correct port and network (SSID/Password), changing it in the code at the variable declarations.
For ESP8266 cpp Arduino code, please refer to the esp8266_udp folder Connect your ESP8266, open up the file in Arduino IDE, and flash the program. If you are connected to computer, you can also open up Serial Monitor to see the print statements. Once you have flashed the ESP8266, the next time you connect to a power supply it will automatically run the program. Please make sure that it is listening on the correct port and network (SSID/Password), changing it in the code at the variable declarations.
Please refer to this website or your specific board website for ESP8266 library dependencies.