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.

Supported Minidrones

Paparazzi testflown with: - None yet with latest firmware for Minidrones v 2.6.8 and higher as on 20170719. Soon they will:. The TU Delft has various Minidrones, X-Wing, RollingSpider, Swat, Blaze and intends to testfly them all As long ago as 2015 TU delft has testflown the Rolling Spider, but many things changes with Parrot Firmware.

Soon:

• Spider
  • Parrot Rolling Spider
• Mambo
  • Parrot MAMBO
• Swing
  • Parrot SWING
• 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

• Ultrasonic sensor
• 3-axis gyroscope and 3-axis accelerometer (MPU 6050)
• Vertical camera
• Pressure sensor

Battery

Lithium-Polymer and removable Lasts up 8 min (6 min with wheels) and full recharge in 90 min

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

Press ButtonPress of the on/off small button. 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

• Turn on your minidrone
• Make sure you have bluetooth enabled on your computer

• 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

-- Note --

• {TODO: fix in code} You will need to enable the actuators by telnetting to the drone and typing: gpio 39 -d lo 0

Setup normal Bluetooth

• 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)

Airframe

A Parrot minidrone eample airframe is in the works... The code is not yet available in Paparazzi Mater. For the Time being, progress here. As soon as testflights are performed a pull request will be made and example in the Main Paparazzi repository

Bottom camera

All minidrones have a camera which can be used for various purposes

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