A video of a rifle-shaped device which the US Army’s Cyber Institute appears to be using to shoot down domestic drones has been attracted a big audience on the internet.

What they have done is connect a Raspberry Pi to a Wi-Fi antenna which transmits a data signal which can trigger a known command in a commercial quadrotor.

There are now off-the-shelf Linux-based applications that can identify the wireless signals from a drone and then intercept the signals used to control them. The same technique could be used to control the cameras of a drone, for example.

In an interview with Popular Mechanics, Captain Brent Chapman says:

“It was something that we built in order to illustrate the power of enabling the soldiers at the tactical level to ‘make’ in support of a mission. It is an idea we call tactical making, or expeditionary making.”

With drones now being more than just “boys toys”, I think this demonstrates the need for increased security and even encrypted signals for future control of drones.

“This really isn’t a use of Raspberry Pi that we envisioned when we were designing the thing,” writes Liz Upton on the official Raspberry Pi blog.