Lesson: The Tello-SDK

The Tello-SDK is a Java project. It contains several packages, each with one or more classes that present the data and methods used to control a Tello drone.

The first package is called tello. It contains one class called Main. Main is the starting point for the compiled project when it is run. In Main some set up is performed and then as a convention, Main creates an instance of a drone control program class and executes it. These drone control classes are written by you, the programmer and added to the tello package. This course will provide example control classes for you to use.

The next package is tellolib.communication. It contains one class called TelloCommunication. This class handles the details of connecting to and communicating with the drone. You should not have need to use this class directly.

The next package is tellolib.command. It contains classes that handle sending commands to the drone. You should not have need to use these class directly but the class TelloCommandValues contains a list of all the Tello commands supported by the SDK.

Note: Not all commands are supported by the basic Tello. The doc for each command will indicate which commands are not supported by the basic Tello and the SDK classes will catch attempts to use a command not compatible with the drone under control.

The  next package is tellolib.drone. It contains the TelloDrone class which holds status information about the drone under control. You can use methods on this class to get the status information.

The next package is tellolib.control. It contains TelloControl class which is the workhorse of the SDK. You use the methods on this class to access drone control functions. TelloControl uses all of the previously listed classes to communicate with and control the drone. TelloControl has the ability to automatically monitor the status sent back by the drone and update the TelloDrone class with that information.

The next package is tellolib.camera. It contains several classes used to access the Tello video camera. The main class is TelloCamera. These classes support the video feed, taking pictures, recording video and doing marker and face detection.

The final package is tellolib.exception. This package contains several exception (error) classes that can be thrown when errors are detected in any of the SDK classes.

We will explore these classes and what they can do as we proceed through the examples. Each class has full intellisense documentation of its methods and there is full Javadoc style documentation for the SDK located in the doc folder of the project (click on index.html).

The full documentation from the drone manufacturer is located in the Tello Manuals folder of the project. The Tello SDK Doc 1.3 is for the basic Tello and the Tello SDK 2.0 User Guide is for the Tello EDU.