Rosetta Drone began when my Rogue Squadron cofounder Ryan Beall had an idea: wouldn’t it be cool if we could control DJI drones with mavlink, an open-source drone protocol? That would allow us to fly DJIs with software from the vibrant open-source drone ecosystem.
I took that as a challenge. In the ensuing months, I wrote Rosetta Drone, an Android application that wraps DJI’s SDK in the mavlink protocol. It allowed users to fly DJIs with QGroundControl, a leading open-source GCS. This supported a variety of DoD counter-UAS testing needs. Even better, we released the project as open source on GitHub. Our goal was to give DJI owners an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the open-source ecosystem and to support further open-source development, both part of a necessary response to ensure U.S. consumers had a range of options available for their sUAS needs and were not locked into a single foreign, proprietary company.
After the first release I transitioned the project to another Android developer on our team, who did a phenomenal job improving and sustaining it.
Code: https://github.com/diux-dev/rosettadrone
Static clone: https://gitlab.com/jacobsenmd/rosettadrone