How to establish a bluetooth connection with Parrot Minidrone?

Hello,

Recently I bought a Parrot Rolling Spider Minidrone, and I'm struggling with establishing a bluetooth connection. I've tried to connect by internal bluetooth device in my laptop and the external bluetooth dongle, both compatible with Bluetooth 4.0. I've tried to connect with two OS, i.e., Ubuntu 16.04, and Windows 10, and in both cases the Parrot Minidrone is visible by the system under two MAC addresses. I'm using Matlab 2017b software.

1. Ubuntu 16.04 approach:

I have run the hardware setup with the Simulink Support Package for Parrot Minidrones, and followed the steps until the one, where the bluetooth connection ought to be established. I've used bluez 5.48 version of bluetooth driver.

a) When I've clicked "Next", I've obtained the message "Hardware setup error - Unable to create a Bluetooth network interface. Ensure that relevant drivers are installed for the Bluetooth adapter and click next to proceed."

b) I've tried to connect using terminal command

sudo hcitool cc [MAC Address]

the connection with the device lasts for aprrox 1s, and then disconnects.

c) I've installed blueman, opened Bluetooth Manager, then I've successfully paired the device, and tried to connect as a group network. In this state, the bluetooth network configuration using Simulink Support Package proceeds well, and I can ping the parrot minidrone, so the connection seem to work well. Unfortunately after approximately 30s, the bluetooth manager returns the message "Connection Failed: Network Manager failed to activate connection", and the connection breaks.

2. Windows 10 approach:

I have installed the drivers that were mentioned on the Support Package website, and then followed the hardware setup steps. After pairing the device, in the "Devices and printers" tab, I can choose only "Connect using -> access point", which does not allow me to establish the bluetooth connection with the hardware setup wizard.

Also I'm wondering whether the device should connect to the FreeFlight Mini application after the firmware upload? In my case, after the firmware upload, Parrot Minidrone connects to the application, and shows the software version 0.0.0.

I will be very grateful for any help!

[Ankur Bose]

Hi,

Rolling Spider is officially NOT supported in Ubuntu 16.04. It is supported in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. If you want to work in Ubuntu 16.04,

you can try out the below command in Terminal and see if it works.

 bt-network -c < minidrone MAC address > gn

You need to install required bluez-tools for this. If you have managed to get your drone connected using bt-network , then you also need to set the IP of the created interface so that you can deploy code from Simulink.

Hence after successful connection of the drone, do 'ifconfig'. You should see a network interface 'bnep0'. Set the IP of the this interface to 192.168.3.2

 sudo ifconfig bnep0 192.168.3.2 up

ping the drone to make sure the connection is successful.

ping -S 192.168.3.2 192.168.3.5

In case of Windows, the default Windows Bluetooth does not work with the Rolling Spider. You need to use a supported CSR Bluetooth adapter. Visit this MATLAB answer to find the correct dongle for Windows.