To fly autonomous to a certain geo coordinate a GPS is needed. Although it is theoretically possible to use the original orange Parrot GPS dongle it is not advised, the performance is just not good enough for great autonomous flights. The solution that is advised is to use an uBlox GPS module. A FTDI TTL 232R 3V3 WE cable is used, where - WE stans for wire ended. 3V3 operates at +3.3V levels (signals only, VCC= +5V) How to connect USB to uBlox Helix GPS for Parrot ARDrone2 To connect a uBlox with Helix antenna via a USB to serial cable that you can just plug into your ARdrone 2 Example of a via USB connected uBlox Helix GPS for Parrot ARDrone2 TTL - 232R - 5V, TTL - 232R - 3V3 Connector color coding Use the sirf gps subsystem. When we connected the GPS Receiver (GPS) to the AR Drone 2.0 (Drone) and searched on the Drone, we found out that nothing happened. After some research we found out that there was no USB serial driver available on the Drone to recognize the GPS.

From USGlobalstat, the manufacturer of the GPS, we found out that we needed an pl2303 driver. On the internet another project was reported and there they were installing drivers for the Drone. parrot ar drone xatakaWe followed these steps but some errors occurred because we are using an AR Drone 2.0.parrot ar drone alza Once we found out that the Drone is running another version of Linux we have to change that. ar drone 2 menzilWe had also some troubles with finding the right .config file to use. Finally we were able to make the modules, including the usbserial and pl2303, for the Drone. From the make step we were getting 2 files, usbserial.ko and pl2303.ko. We put those files on the Drone by using FTP. Once the files are on the Drone we connected to the Drone by Telnet and went to the /data/video folder were the files we located.

By insmodding the .ko files we installed the drivers on the linux system and we were able to connect the GPS to the Drone. After connecting the GPS was recognized and was mounted to /dev/ttyUSB0.Create a gist now Instantly share code, notes, and snippets. parrot ar drone 2.0 arduino communication with node possible other names: ardrono, dronenodeuino, ardronenodeuino, arnodedroneduino ahahahah above shot is from @rem getting node on the drone untar node-serialport and put node and the node-serialport folder onto a usb thumbstick thingy put the thumbstick thingy into the drone (like in the above photo) telnet into drone, telnet 192.168.1.1(it might be usb1) cp -r usb/node-serialport/ node_modules/ note: you can use node-serialport to get data from arduino but you can't use johnny-five because it depends on firmata which doesn't support Tx/Rx serial communication this last point means you have to write actual arduino sketches and upload them to the arduino directly, but you can still write node code that runs on the drone to reads the serial data

also I found out that since the serial port on the drone is intended as a debug console you will get a bunch of debug data spewing out at you from the boards Tx pin. I don't know how to turn it off at this time. what this means is you can send data into the drone over serial but you can't (to my knowledge -- someone should hack this) send data from the drone over serial to a device yet here is where things get tricky be very careful that you don't eff up your drone! the drone has a female USB port exposed next to the battery connector but unfortunately it is hardcoded into host mode so it can only be used with mass storage devices :( that last point is based on my naive understanding of electronics. prove me wrong and fork these instructions! there is another serial console on the drone motherboard open up the bottom of the drone under the little piece of black tape to expose a buncha plastic hole thingies: turns out this has pins for TTL serial communication and USB serial communication.

this awesome post by jazzomaniak is where I figured this out here is a pinout from jazzomaniak: ** it has come to my attention that the serial console tx/rx pins on the AR Drone 2 run at 1.8v which means you'll need a level converter to talk to the arduino. here is a schematic from the mirumod project that shows where the level converter should be installed ** without a level converter i still was able to receive and transmit serial data from arduino to drone but it was flaky. i believe (but have not yet tested) that after fixing the voltage mismatch that communication will be much more reliable you'll wanna get some thinnish gauge wire (around AWG 16 I reckon, AWG 22 is for most breadboards and my 22 wire didn't fit into the drone serial ports) get an arduino uno which provides 5v or 3.3v TTL serial via digital ports (Rx and Tx). due and uno have this, not sure about others here is a shot from @rem of drone with the entire bottom cover removed you can also theoretically power the arduino from #8 and #9 on the drone if you hook them up to a barrel power jack thingy for the arduino (or use the Vin and GND pins for the same effect).

I haven't hooked this up yet cause I ran out of cables. @rem in the comments below said he got it working you can also use the other USB port on the drone to power the arduino, but I don't have a short enough USB cable for this upload the sketch in this gist called helloworld.pde to the arduino in a telnet shell on the drone type cat /proc/cmdline and find out which tty device the 'console' is set to. on my drone it was ttyO3 set the tty socket to raw mode: stty -F /dev/ttyO3 -raw verify the baud rate of the socket: stty -F /dev/ttyO3. mine originally said 115200 but after messing with it it seems to change to 9600. the arduino sketch and the node code running on the drone need to both contain whatever stty tells you the baud rate is for communication to work. the Input/output error above is because I was sending serial data from the arduino into the drone. I unplugged the serial cables from the arduino and tried the command again and it worked. I think it was around this time that the drone decided to switch baud rates to 9600