Flying the AR.Drone with a PS3 game controller

I am getting better at flying my drone. This time I made a little hack on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus phone so that I could fly it with the PS3 Controller's analogue joysticks. The whole project was easier than I expected and my god it works like a charm, it is so much easier to control with the wireess PS3 controller.

How does it work? I start the Freeflight application and I use the PS3 to virtually control that application. My phone connects the PS3 game controller via bluetooth and the drone via WiFi.

How to do it?

1. Root the Android phone. That was the hardest part and my hack required flashing the phone
• I used the "Restore" hack with the Nexus Root Toolkit from WugFresh
• http://www.wugfresh.com/nrt/
2. Get the Six-axis Controller application for the phone from Dancing Pixels Studio
• Pair the controller with the phone's bluetooth
• Take a screenshot of the Freeflight in Piloting mode
• Map the PS3 buttons and create the controller profile
• Left and Right analogue sticks 
• "Start" for "Takeoff" 
• "X" for camera snapshot
• "Triangle" for switch cameras
3. Fly
• Start Six-axis Controller app
• Press power on PS3 controller, wait for sync
• Insert the battery in the drone
• Connect phone WiFi to drone
• Start Freeflight 2.0 app, start piloting, start recording, recording to USB stick may add another flying minute.
• Put phone in shirt pocket
• PS3 controller
• Hit Start to fly
• Fly using sticks (Easy)
• take pictures with X