Main Page

Welcome To Paparazzi

General Hardware Software Miscellaneous

The Paparazzi Project Paparazzi is a free and open-source hardware and software project intended to create an exceptionally powerful and versatile autopilot system by allowing and encouraging input from the community. The project includes not only the airborne hardware and software, from voltage regulators and GPS receivers to Kalman filtering code, but also a powerful and ever-expanding array of ground hardware and software including modems, antennas, and a highly evolved user-friendly ground control software interface. All hardware and software is open-source and freely available to anyone under the GNU licencing agreement. Efforts are currently underway to organize production and retail sales of the autopilot and popular accessories, making the system much easier and more affordable for all. The key feature of the paparazzi autopilot is its unique combination of infrared thermopiles and inertial measurement for attitude sensing, providing a robust and accurate attitude estimate that requires no ground calibration and can recover from any launch attitude. The Paparazzi project at ENAC The Paparazzi mini UAV project is now being used and developed at ENAC University. A debian repository containing some packages not in the official distribution and required to run Paparazzi. PaparazziX Knoppix based live CD is available from the paparazzix directory. Nightly and release tarballs. News September 17th, 2007 MAV 07 MAV 07 will be held in Toulouse, France (of course!) September 17-21, 2007. Expect to see lots of great Paparazzi systems kicking ass and taking names! August 28, 2007 Paul MacCready 1925-2007 Dr. Paul MacCready, legendary aeronautical engineer and founder of Aerovironment, died in his sleep at the age of 81. Many of us met him met him in 2005 at MAV05 in Germany but all of us are familiar with his incredible body of work ranging from the first human powered aircraft, to the GM Sunraycer electric car, and the world altitude record holding Helios. MacCready was a world champion sailplane pilot, holds a Cal Tech Ph.D. in aeronautics, has been granted 7 honorary degrees, and has contributed a total of 4 aircraft and one car to the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution. He founded Aerovironment in 1971, the world's largest supplier of hand-launched UAVs. August 21th, 2007 Flying south east of the Hofsjökull glacier Three Paparazzi equipped Funjets were part of the Flohof measurement campaign around the Hofsjökull glacier on Iceland. We were able to measure temperature, humidity, pressure and estimate the wind. The authorities issued a NOTAM, clearing the airspace up to 12.000 feet which allowed us to set a new Paparazzi altitude record. March 1st, 2007 Part of the ENAC multiplex foamy fleet Sun is finally back. We took all those babies for a multiple aircrafts flight. From left to right : 600g minimag, 900g twinjet, 600g funjet and 350g microjet. It's such a shame that multiplex stoped producing microjets..... they didn't even ask us :( February 5th, 2007 Download the video Jeremie Vacher, a student at ENAC, has developed a tracker for antennas. It is functionnal but still needs a little bit of polishing. Anybody interrested ? December 7th, 2006 Download the video Antoine continues to make great progress toward the holy grail of 17 state inertial navigation and releases a video showing the performance of the 7-state Kalman filtered IMU providing the attitude-heading reference system (AHRS) on his quadrotor. Note how much coffee was consumed in preparation for this video. More info on the IMU is available on the sensors page. Also, be sure to admire the schematics and source code! News Archives