Setting up a Drone Programming Environment using DroneKit on Windows 7

1) Download and install APM Planner 2 for Windows.

2) Download and install Python 2.7 for  Windows. Make sure the following options are set.

1. Install for all users
2. Destination directory: C:\Python2.7
3. Add python.exe to Path

3) Open a command prompt (cmd.exe) to test if the installation was successful.

1. >python -V

4) Install virtualenv

1.  >pip install virtualenv

5) Create and activate the dronekit virtual environment.

1. >md SRG-Bots 
2. >cd SRG-Bots
3. >virtualenv dronekit_env
4. >dronekit_env\Scripts\activate.bat

6) Install the required packages. This may take a while.

1. >pip install dronekit dronekit-sitl mavproxy wget

7) At this point the required packages have been installed. Start dronekit-sitl.

1. >dronekit_env\Scripts\dronekit-sitl.exe copter-3.3

8) Open a new command prompt then run mavproxy.

1. >cd SRG-Bots
2. >dronekit_env\Scripts\activate.bat
3. >python dronekit_env\Scripts\mavproxy.py --master tcp:127.0.0.1:5760 --sitl 127.0.0.1:5501 --out 127.0.0.1:14550 --out 127.0.0.1:14551

9) Run APM Planner 2.

10) Open a new command prompt. Download and run an example.

1. >cd SRG-Bots
2. >dronekit_env\Scripts\activate.bat
3. >python
4. >>>import wget
5. >>>wget.download('https://github.com/dronekit/dronekit-python/raw/master/examples/simple_goto/simple_goto.py')
6. >>>quit()
7. >python simple_goto.py --connect "udp:127.0.0.1:14551"