Tello Drone Controller

A desktop control console for the DJI/Ryze Tello mini drone — full manual flight control, a live video feed, and local recording, built with Electron and Node.js.

Features

• Full manual flight control — takeoff/land, directional movement (forward/back/left/right/up/down), rotation, and flips, via on-screen buttons or keyboard.
• Live video feed — the Tello's H.264 stream is decoded and displayed in real time using ffmpeg, re-muxed as MJPEG over a local HTTP server.
• Video recording — record the live feed straight to a local .mp4 (stream-copied, no re-encoding), saved to your Videos/TelloPro folder. Recordings are automatically finalized into a normal, fully seekable file once you stop recording.
• Keyboard shortcuts — W A S D to move, Q/E to rotate, ↑/↓ for altitude, Space to takeoff/land.
• Persisted trim settings — your preferred move distance, rotation angle, and flight speed are remembered between launches, and speed is automatically re-applied to the drone on connect.
• Safety features — an Emergency Stop for cutting the motors instantly, and a Disconnect that's only available once the drone has landed (checked both in the UI and independently in the app's main process, using the drone's own reported altitude).
• Built-in instructions — a getting-started guide is shown on first launch, and is reachable any time via the Help button.
• Windows installer — packaged with electron-builder, with a standard install wizard that lets the user choose their own install location.

Download

Prebuilt Windows installer: see the Releases page and grab the latest Tello Pro Setup win x64 <version>.exe (for windows). Run it, choose your install location, and launch Tello Pro from the Start Menu — no need to build from source.

Building from source (below) is only needed if you want to modify the app yourself.

Requirements

• Node.js 18 or newer
• ffmpeg installed and available on your system PATH (required only for the live video feed and recording — flight controls work without it)
• A DJI/Ryze Tello or Tello EDU drone

Project structure

tello-drone-controller/
└── desktop/          # the Electron app (Tello Pro)
    ├── main.js        # main process: UDP link to the drone, video
    │                  #   pipeline, IPC handlers
    ├── preload.js      # safe IPC bridge exposed to the renderer
    ├── renderer/       # the UI (controller buttons + video preview)
    ├── build/          # app icon
    └── package.json

Getting started

cd desktop
npm install
npm start

On launch, the app itself will walk you through connecting — the short version:

1. Power on the Tello.
2. Join your computer's Wi-Fi to the drone's own network, shown in your Wi-Fi list as something like TELLO-XXXXXX. The Tello creates its own hotspot — it does not join your home router, and there's no internet access while connected to it.
3. Click Connect in the app.
4. Fly.

Building a Windows installer

cd desktop
npm run dist

This produces an installer under desktop/dist/, with a normal install wizard (not a silent one-click install) that lets the user pick where to install the app.

Known limitations

• The regular consumer Tello can only run as its own Wi-Fi access point — it cannot join your home router. Only the Tello EDU supports "station mode" for that.
• The Tello has no microphone, so recordings have no audio.
• Live video has roughly 1–2 seconds of latency, inherent to decoding H.264 through ffmpeg and re-encoding as MJPEG for preview — fine for situational awareness and framing shots, not for tight FPV-style flying.

Author

Built by Mussa Charles / Myssa Technologies Company Ltd.

License

MIT © 2026 Mussa Charles / Myssa Technologies Company Ltd. See LICENSE for the full text.