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Multiple AR Drones

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Mani Monajjemi edited this page Jan 7, 2013 · 5 revisions

Summary

This instruction will show you how to configure single or multiple AR-Drone 2.0s to connect to a managed wifi network (e.g. a wifi router) without breaking the default ad-hoc network connection.

Disclaimer

Please be advised that this instruction is for advanced users with high technical skills. Changing anything on your AR-Drone may void its warranty. You may damage your AR-Drone firmware(software) or hardware permanently if making mistakes. No warranty or guarantee is provided for this instruction; you follow them at your own risk. If you are at all uncomfortable or inexperienced please reconsider doing the job yourself.

Requirements

  • A dedicated wireless router for the setup
  • At least one AR-Drone 2.0 quadrocopter

Step 1: Configure wifi Network

Configure your wireless router to create a managed wifi network without security (e.g. dronenet). In my experiments I was not able to make drones connect to a WEP/WPA secured networks. This might be because of either a bug in firmware or in my connection script. Configure the router to have the IP address of 192.168.1.1 on subnet 255.255.255.0. Configure the router's DHCP server to give clients IP addresses starting from 192.168.1.100, we will reserve lower IP numbers for drones.

Step 2: Configure Each Drone

  • Connect to your AR-Drone's ad-hoc wifi network
  • Telnet to your drone
mani@pc# telnet 192.168.1.1

Trying 192.168.1.1...
Connected to 192.168.1.1.
Escape character is '^]'.



BusyBox v1.14.0 () built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
  • Create a file named wifi.sh in /data/ directory on the drone:
# vi /data/wifi.sh

  • Change network SSID in line 3 and IP number in line 4 of the following code, then copy & paste it into the file. The SSID is what you set up in step 1. The IP should be unique for each drone from the reserved range.

    killall udhcpd ifconfig ath0 down iwconfig ath0 mode managed essid dronenet ifconfig ath0 192.168.1.10 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

Hint if you are not familiar with vi: Press i in vi to go to insert mode, paste the code by pressing shift-ctrl-v, press ESC to exit insert mode. Type :wq to write and quit.

  • Make the newly created file executable
# chmod +x /data/wifi.sh
  • Close the telnet connection
# exit
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