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 **parrot ar drone box without a level converter i still was able to receive and transmit serial data from arduino to drone but it was flaky. what is the best parrot ar dronei believe (but have not yet tested) that after fixing the voltage mismatch that communication will be much more reliablebuy ar drone parts australia 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)rc drone aircraft for sale get an arduino uno which provides 5v or 3.3v TTL serial via digital ports (Rx and Tx). ar drone power edition range

due and uno have this, not sure about othersar drone motor stops here is a shot from @rem of drone with the entire bottom cover removedar drone parrot store 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 go into a node repl (./node) and copy paste in helloworld.js from this gist sp = ("", { Follow the above steps to connect the Parrot Airborne Night to your smart device via Bluetooth. In FreeFlight Mini, go to    > Check for updates. Follow the on-screen direction to download updates. 1. Power on the Parrot Airborne Night and wait until the lights (eyes) turn green. 2. Connect the drone to your computer using a USB/micro-USB cable (provided).

>Wait until the drone’s “right-eye” light is a steady green 4. Under DOWNLOADS, click Software update to download the update file. DO NOT RENAME THE FILE. 5. Drag and drop the update file into Parrot Airborne Night as though it were a USB Flash drive. The update file must be placed at the root of the drone and not in a folder. >The lights flash while the update file is being transferred. >Once the transfer is complete, the right-eye light remains green, and the left-eye orange. 6. Safely remove and disconnect the Parrot Airborne Night from your computer.The lights alternately flash orange with increasing rapidity. Do not remove the battery from while the update installation is in progress. 7. The installation is complete when the lights turn green. If you are unable to complete the update using either Bluetooth or USB, you may need to reset the drone to reinitialize the software. Insert a fully charged battery and wait for the lights to turn green.