Drone Development from Concept to Flight. Design, assemble, and discover the applications of unmanned aerial vehicles

Sumit Sharma

Unlock opportunities in the growing UAV market where drones are revolutionizing diverse sectors like agriculture, surveying, and the military. This book walks you through the complete drone development life cycle, from concept to pilot stage, prototyping, and ultimately, a market-ready product, with domain-specific applications.Starting with an introduction to unmanned systems, principles of drone flight, and it's motion in 3D space, this book shows you how to design a propulsion system tailored to your drone’s needs. You’ll then get hands on with the entire drone assembly process, covering airframe, components, and wiring. Next, you’ll enhance drone connectivity and navigation with communication devices, such as RFD900, Herelink, and H-16 Pro GCS and hardware protocols like I2C, and UART. The book also guides you in using the open-source flight software ArduPilot and PX4, along with firmware architecture and PID tuning for advanced control. Additionally, you’ll go learn about AeroGCS, Mission Planner, and UGCS ground control stations, tips for maiden flight and log analysis for optimizing performance while building a custom survey drone with a 60-min endurance, 10km range, live video feed, and photography options.By the end of this book, you’ll be equipped with all you need to build and fly your own drones and UAVs.

Creating Development Environments with Vagrant. Leverage the power of Vagrant to create and manage virtual development environments with Puppet, Chef, and VirtualBox

MICHAEL KEITH PEACOCK

Getting Started with Elastic Stack 8.0. Run powerful and scalable data platforms to search, observe, and secure your organization

Asjad Athick, Shay Banon

The Elastic Stack helps you work with massive volumes of data to power use cases in the search, observability, and security solution areas.This three-part book starts with an introduction to the Elastic Stack with high-level commentary on the solutions the stack can be leveraged for. The second section focuses on each core component, giving you a detailed understanding of the component and the role it plays. You’ll start by working with Elasticsearch to ingest, search, analyze, and store data for your use cases. Next, you’ll look at Logstash, Beats, and Elastic Agent as components that can collect, transform, and load data. Later chapters help you use Kibana as an interface to consume Elastic solutions and interact with data on Elasticsearch. The last section explores the three main use cases offered on top of the Elastic Stack. You’ll start with a full-text search and look at real-world outcomes powered by search capabilities. Furthermore, you’ll learn how the stack can be used to monitor and observe large and complex IT environments. Finally, you’ll understand how to detect, prevent, and respond to security threats across your environment. The book ends by highlighting architecture best practices for successful Elastic Stack deployments.By the end of this book, you’ll be able to implement the Elastic Stack and derive value from it.

Python Data Cleaning Cookbook. Modern techniques and Python tools to detect and remove dirty data and extract key insights

Michael Walker

Getting clean data to reveal insights is essential, as directly jumping into data analysis without proper data cleaning may lead to incorrect results. This book shows you tools and techniques that you can apply to clean and handle data with Python. You'll begin by getting familiar with the shape of data by using practices that can be deployed routinely with most data sources. Then, the book teaches you how to manipulate data to get it into a useful form. You'll also learn how to filter and summarize data to gain insights and better understand what makes sense and what does not, along with discovering how to operate on data to address the issues you've identified. Moving on, you'll perform key tasks, such as handling missing values, validating errors, removing duplicate data, monitoring high volumes of data, and handling outliers and invalid dates. Next, you'll cover recipes on using supervised learning and Naive Bayes analysis to identify unexpected values and classification errors, and generate visualizations for exploratory data analysis (EDA) to visualize unexpected values. Finally, you'll build functions and classes that you can reuse without modification when you have new data. By the end of this Python book, you'll be equipped with all the key skills that you need to clean data and diagnose problems within it.

haXe 2 Beginner's Guide. Develop exciting applications with this multi-platform programming language

Benjamin Dasnois, haXe PAYPAL haxelang@gmail.com

Modern Computer Vision with PyTorch. A practical roadmap from deep learning fundamentals to advanced applications and Generative AI - Second Edition

V Kishore Ayyadevara, Yeshwanth Reddy

Whether you are a beginner or are looking to progress in your computer vision career, this book guides you through the fundamentals of neural networks (NNs) and PyTorch and how to implement state-of-the-art architectures for real-world tasks.The second edition of Modern Computer Vision with PyTorch is fully updated to explain and provide practical examples of the latest multimodal models, CLIP, and Stable Diffusion.You’ll discover best practices for working with images, tweaking hyperparameters, and moving models into production. As you progress, you'll implement various use cases for facial keypoint recognition, multi-object detection, segmentation, and human pose detection. This book provides a solid foundation in image generation as you explore different GAN architectures. You’ll leverage transformer-based architectures like ViT, TrOCR, BLIP2, and LayoutLM to perform various real-world tasks and build a diffusion model from scratch. Additionally, you’ll utilize foundation models' capabilities to perform zero-shot object detection and image segmentation. Finally, you’ll learn best practices for deploying a model to production.By the end of this deep learning book, you'll confidently leverage modern NN architectures to solve real-world computer vision problems.

Unity 3.x Game Development Essentials. If you have an idea for a game but lack the skills to create it, this book is the perfect introduction. There’s lots of handholding through all the essentials, culminating in the building of a full 3D game

Will Goldstone

Game Engines such as Unity are the power-tools behind the games we know and love. Unity is one of the most widely-used and best loved packages for game development and is used by everyone, from hobbyists to large studios, to create games and interactive experiences for the web, desktop, mobile, and console. With Unity’s intuitive, easy to learn toolset and this book – it’s never been easier to become a game developer. Taking a practical approach, this book will introduce you to the concepts of developing 3D games, before getting to grips with development in Unity itself – prototyping a simple scenario, and then creating a larger game. From creating 3D worlds to scripting and creating game mechanics you will learn everything you’ll need to get started with game development. This book is designed to cover a set of easy-to-follow examples, which culminate in the production of a First Person 3D game, complete with an interactive island environment. All of the concepts taught in this book are applicable to other types of game, however, by introducing common concepts of game and 3D production, you'll explore Unity to make a character interact with the game world, and build puzzles for the player to solve, in order to complete the game. At the end of the book, you will have a fully working 3D game and all the skills required to extend the game further, giving your end-user, the player, the best experience possible. Soon you will be creating your own 3D games with ease!

BackTrack - Testing Wireless Network Security. Secure your wireless networks against attacks, hacks, and intruders with this step-by-step guide

Kevin Cardwell

Wireless networks are everywhere. You have probably set one up yourself, but have you ever wondered just how safe you are while browsing online? In the majority of cases, the default settings for your networks are not enough to protect you. With your data being transferred over the air, it can be easily plucked and used by anyone who knows how. Don't let it happen to you.BackTrack - Testing Wireless Network Security will help you secure your wireless networks and keep your personal data safe. With this book, you will learn how to configure your hardware for optimum security, find network security holes, and fix them.BackTrack - Testing Wireless Network Security looks at what tools hackers use and shows you how to defend yourself against them. Taking you from no prior knowledge all the way to a fully secure environment, this guide provides useful tips every step of the way. Learn how to select a wireless card to work with the Backtrack tools, run spectrum analysis scans using kismet, set up test networks, and perform attacks against wireless networks. Use the tools aircrack-ng and airodump-ng to crack the wireless encryption used on the network.You will learn everything you need to know to set up your wireless network for use within Backtrack and also how to defend yourself against the included attack tools.