Ap.parrot minidrone

Intro

Without Paparazzi the Parrot Minidrones are nice small flying quadrotor that can be flown over a Bluetooth connection with an Android or iOS device. Not any more: With a few simple clicks you can run Paparazzi on you Minidrone and let it perfrom whater you wan it to.

Although there are various different Parrot minidrones, the base of all the drones is the same. that is whay you see all thi info on just one page.

NOTE: THis page is a work in progress (WIP) and partly will not reflect the current state of Paparazzi and will contain major errors. in the imeframe of 20170719 till 20170820 this page will have massively improved. If you can help, help out, if not... hope that other are willing to spend their time on improving support.

Supported Minidrones

Paparazzi have been tested with modified version of v2.6.8 firmware. The original firmware doesn't allow network connections required to upload and run Paparazzi. Discussion are opened with Parrot to distribute the alternate firmware or integrate the modification to the standard one. The supported models are (20170725, master):

• Swing
  

Soon:

• Spider
  • Parrot Rolling Spider
• Mambo
  • Parrot MAMBO
• Airborne Night
  • Parrot Airborne Night Maclane
  • Parrot Airborne Night Blaze
  • Parrot Airborne Night Swat
• Airborne Cargo
  • Parrot Airborne Cargo Travis

The Jumping Sumo and Hydrofoil extension, while Paparazzi likely can run on those, since they cannot fly there are no plans for testing or support. If you have on and teste it, make a pull request with any improvments you made, welcomed

Notes

This article assumes that you have already installed Paprazzi software on you local development PC. Used is Ubuntu 16.04. older version have different Bluetooth support, instructions there maydiffer.

Features

Connectivity

The minidrones have a Bluetooth Smart technology, Bluetooth V4.0 BLE device. Communication over older 2.0 bluetooth also possible after making some configuration changes on the Minidrone. Paparazzi can do this for you automatically

Sensors

• 3-axis gyroscope and 3-axis accelerometer (MPU 6050)
• Pressure sensor
• Ultrasonic sensor (not supported yet)
• Vertical camera (not supported yet)

Battery

• Swappable: Yes
• Type: Lithium-polymer 1s
• Capacity: 550mAh
• Charging time: about 25 minutes
• Compatibility: Parrot Jumping Night, Jumping Race, Airborne Night, Airborne Cargo and Hydrofoil

How to connect

There are two ways to connect to the Rolling Spider with Paparazzi. The first one is an USB cable and the second one is via a Bluetooth connection. Both have the possibility to transfer files through FTP and execute programs over telnet. Note that connecting over USB disables the vertical camera, as it uses the same USB bus.

Pre steps

Latest Parrot firmware needs some buttonpressing before we can start usng the connection in combination with Paparzzzi

4x Button press

After the drone is fully started, on e.g. the Blaze visible by green LED's, then press the small on/off button four times (4x) in succession Note that it will take a while before the Connection is ready.

Connect with USB

• Switch on your Minidrone
• Plug in a micro-usb cable from your Drone to the computer
• A new network device will show up
• Connect with 192.168.2.1 through ftp or telnet

Connect via Bluetooth

Using blueman tool (tested with Ubuntu 16.04)

• Install blueman

 sudo apt install blueman

• Turn on your minidrone
• Enable bluetooth on your computer (can be done from blueman applet if present)
• Scan or select your minidrone from the list of the peripheral

Blueman: peripherals list

• Configure this peripheral and select the "network access point" connection type

Blueman: type of connection

• A new network connection should appear

 % ifconfig bnep0
 bnep0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 5c:e0:c5:63:8e:5d  
           inet adr:192.168.4.2  Bcast:192.168.4.255  Masque:255.255.255.0
           ...

• The minidrone has the IP 192.168.4.1, connect with telnet via:

telnet 192.168.4.1

Older Ubuntu versions using the pand tool

• Execute "hcitool scan" and look for the mac address of the "RS_...." device. (If you cannot find it look at #Setup normal Bluetooth)
• Install the bluez-utils package (if not installed) with "sudo apt-get install bluez-utils"
• Execute "sudo pand --connect <MAC address> -dGN -n", to connect to the bluetooth of the drone. *
• Execute "sudo ifconfig bnep0 192.168.2.3 up", to setup the ethernet device over bluetooth. *
• Connect with the drone with telnet via:

telnet 192.168.2.1

Setup normal Bluetooth

This part doesn't seem to be needed anymore!!!

• First connect over Bluetooth 4.0 or USB to the drone as described above
• Connect with telnet to the drone. (telnet 192.168.*.1)
• Open the "/etc/init.d/rcS" file and search for the line with "BLEproxy". (vi /etc/init.d/rcS)
• Now change the "BLEproxy" to "BLEproxy --normalbt"
• Reboot your drone by executing: "reboot". (This makes sure the filesystem is saved)

Upload Paprazzi

If you do have a connection, press the upload button in the Paparazzi center

Airframe

At the moment, only the Swing airframe is supported and an example file is available: https://github.com/paparazzi/paparazzi/blob/master/conf/airframes/examples/swing.xml

Power button

Once the Paparazzi autopilot is running, the original Parrot software is stopped, keeping the network connection over Wifi opened. A side effect is that the power button needs to be managed by Paparazzi as well. When pressing it, the board will reboot, restarting immediately with the original software. Pressing again the button will stop the minidrone.

Bottom camera

All minidrones have a camera which can be used for various purposes. 160x120 pixels.

Optic Flow

Using the Optic flow module the Drone should be able to hover still.

Extend Hardware

GPS

An GPS connected to the USB port, while possible, never done yet.

Serial

XBee and Si10xx based modems

By using external modems it is possible to exten the range of the drones.

Micro laser range ring

A TU Delft project makes it possible to fly autonomous inside a building using micro laser rangers. See {TODO}

Links

Some links that might be helpful for developers or otherwhise