Paparazzi UAV at 32C3 Recap

January 4, 2016 Piotr Esden-Tempski

Here is a short review of our Paparazzi UAV meet up at the 32C3.

For those of you who have never heard of the Chaos Communication Congress, it is a hacker conference that takes place every year between Christmas and New Year’s Eve in Germany. For many years it was held in Berlin, but with the increased attendance a larger venue was needed, it is now being held in Hamburg, Germany.

Most people arrive in Hamburg on the 26th of December for day 0 of the conference. We met our assembly in the large Hackcenter hall. EZ who helped organize lodging for a lot of us also found and reserved tables for us. Usually it was the CCC organizers who were reserving the tables for the so called Assemblies. This time they did not do that for any Assembly with less than a 100 members. This shows how big the event is getting.

During the conference we spent a lot of time talking about the future of the Paparazzi project, and making plans for how we can improve things. We had quite a busy table with 30 Paparazzians and friends. People were assembling their airframes and flying them for the medias amusement. We were interviewed by ARTE, the French German culture TV station and a few other media outlets. We are not sure when and where our footage will air, but we will post it here when it does. If you see it on TV, please let us know. 🙂

As always Felix (our tireless maintainer) was very busy merging and improving the Paparazzi UAV codebase. One of the more exciting developments is the improved python ivy bindings. Making the implementation of ground agents in python easier. Additionally, stay tuned for some awesome announcements from Hooperfly who organized his own CCC hackathon in Portland, OR as he could not make it to the real thing.

We also met a lot of old friends, from projects like Sigrok and UAVP-NG. As well as making new connections to projects like Yosys and IceStorm. Formally verified FPGA based autopilots anyone? 🙂

As always, an event like this is incredibly inspiring and productive. We hope you will join us next year to be part of the event.

We will keep you posted if there are any other events where you can meet other Paparazzians. And also let us know if you know of any Paparazzi related events or meetups worth mentioning here, just drop us an email at: press at paparazziuav.org

Hardware, Release

G0 GPS Module

December 28, 2015 Piotr Esden-Tempski

Just in time for the new year 1BitSquared releases a new GPS module named G0. It is designed to neatly fit on top of the Paparazzi UAV Elle0 Autopilot, that they released just a few weeks ago.

G0 features the UBlox Max-7Q chipset, a large ground plane and EMI shielding. Due to the large ground plane and optional side flaps it has good multipath and EMI rejection characteristics, making it a great device to be used on fully autonomous systems that need high precision and reliable GPS reception.

For more information visit the 1BitSquared G0 pre-order page.

Release, Software

Paparazzi V5.8 release

December 24, 2015 Piotr Esden-Tempski

Merry Christmas dear Paparazzians!

We are happy to announce the release of Paparazzi; v5.8, providing you with lots of new features and improvements!

Just to pick out a few:

ADS-B support
improved use of optic flow for velocity estimation
improved mavlink support
possibility to reduce RAM and Flash usage by compressing the sine table
this allowed us to add basic support for naze32, CC3D and CJMCU boards
flip mode for multicopters
INDI guidance loop
lots of improvements/additions for computer vision modules
high speed logging to SD Card via SPI
improve support for Bebop and add Bebop2
guided mode for rotorcrafts

For a detailed overview refer to the CHANGELOG. 🙂

If you are already using paparazzi with Git, to enjoy all improvements you can switch to this new version via:
git remote update && git checkout v5.8

If you are new to Paparazzi and want to join in flying with it, you can you can simply download a tarball or get the source code via:

git clone https://github.com/paparazzi/paparazzi.git -b v5.8

Community, Hardware, Regulation, Research

Lisa/S Nano Quadcopter featured on sUAS News

December 15, 2015 Piotr Esden-Tempski

In the light of the recent FAA registration limits, the great guys at sUAS News wrote an article featuring the Paparazzi UAV powered Lisa/S nano Quadcopter. This platform was developed by 1BitSquared in collaboration with the TU-Delft MAV lab team, provides all the autonomous capabilities while being way below the FAA regulated limits for registration. The Lisa/S nano Quadcopter weighs only 39g while the FAA requires all aircraft above 250g to be registred.

Check out their article for more information.

Community, Hardware, Research, Software

Multi-UAV flights for simultaneous meteorological measurements

December 4, 2015 Gautier Hattenberger 4 Comments

ENAC UAV Lab team and Meteo-France (CNRS-GAME and ENM) teams have spent several days at the Atmospheric Research Center of Lannemezan (in the south of France) in order to perform experiments for simultaneous meteorological measurements through multi-UAV flight.

This was part of a research project called VOLTIGE aimed at studying the formation of cloud and fog events. One of the planes is measuring the turbulence near the ground, a second plane is flying above the cloud or the fog with a radiation sensor and the last one is making a vertical profile of temperature, pressure and humidity up to 1500 meters AGL.

All the planes were controlled by Paparazzi UAV Apogee boards, with on-board logging on SD cards and navigation patterns triggered by sensors readings.

Community, Events

Paparazzi UAV at 32C3

December 1, 2015 Piotr Esden-Tempski

This year we will be having another meetup at the 32nd Chaos Communication Congress (32C3) in Hamburg, Germany. The event is happening from December 27th to 30th, 2015. Make sure to secure your tickets! When you are in the area, find us and say hi! We will have our Assembly there and will have lot’s of cool hardware and people with us. See you there! 😀

Community, Hardware, Release

Elle0 Autopilot

December 1, 2015 Piotr Esden-Tempski

1BitSquared has released Elle0, a new Paparazzi UAV autopilot. Elle0 is the lowest cost autopilot developed specifically for use with the Paparazzi UAV framework. It was inspired by the Lisa/MX and Apogee autopilots and has been stripped down to the most essential features while preserving the flexibility that Paparazzi autopilots are famous for.

Here are some of the specs:

STM32F4 168MHz ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller with FPU
- 1 Mbyte of Flash memory
- 192+4 Kbytes of SRAM including 64-Kbyte of CCM (core coupled memory) data RAM
- Cryptographic acceleration: hardware acceleration for AES 128, 192, 256, Triple DES, HASH (MD5, SHA-1), and HMAC
- True random number generator
3 axis gyroscope (connected over SPI for high speed sampling and low latency)
3 axis accelerometer (connected over SPI for high speed sampling and low latency)
3 axis magnetometer (connected over SPI for high speed sampling and low latency)
barometer (connected over dedicated SPI for low noise operation and low latency)
1 I2C auxilary sensor connection
2 TTL level serial ports for telemetry radio and GPS
2 serial input interfaces for remote control receivers (using Spektrum compatible JST connectors)
1 USB port for easy firmware upgrade
8 PWM outputs/inputs for servos or legacy PPM RC receivers
2 Analog inputs for system battery voltage and current measurement
CAN TX and RX lines are accessible

Mechanically Elle0 is designed around the 30.5mm M3 hole pattern, popularized by the Nano Quad community. But Elle0 can be used on more than just Nano Quads, it has everything on board to control anything from a small Quad through a big Octocopter to Airplanes or Helicopters. For an autonomous UAV you just need to add a GPS, Telemetry radio and maybe RC receivers. 😉

Apropos RC receivers, Elle0 provides two Spektrum Satellite compatible connectors. You don’t have to crimp special wires to connect your Spektrum Diversity setup to your autopilot anymore!

For more information check out our Wiki Page. 1BitSquared is offering Elle0 for Pre-Order in their store. Elle0 will start shipping early 2016.

Community, Hardware, Software

Parrot Bebop 2 Support

November 19, 2015 Piotr Esden-Tempski 2 Comments

Parrot has released their new Bebop 2 camera quadcopter. Paparazzi UAV already has support for that new platform.

Thanks to the great work of the TU-Delft MavLab team and especially Freek van Tienen it is possible to replace the stock functionality of the Parrot Bebop 2 with Paparazzi UAV.

This change gives the platform a lot of autonomous flight enhancements like dynamic flight plans, as well as improved stabilization algorithms like the INDI controller.

We hope you will enjoy converting your Bebop 2 into a serious robotic aircraft. 🙂

For more information you can refer to our Bebop wiki page.

Community, Research

BACCHUS Meteorological Project

October 19, 2015 paparazzi

Researchers from the GMEI/MNPCA have recently returned from a one month field measurement campaign at the weather
station of Mace Head in Ireland.
Their report was very positive with more than forty scientific flights, up to 3350m above sea level, some of them synchronized with a
meteorological satellite overpass, for the study of interactions between clouds and aerosols.
Several unmanned aircraft, equipped with the Paparazzi UAV
systems, have been used, carrying meteorological, aerosol, cloud and 3D wind sensors.
A bungee was used for taking-off, while a big net was needed in
order to recover the planes, since the ground was not suitable for traditional landings.
This campaign was part of the BACCHUS project (Impact of
Biogenic versus Anthropogenic emissions on Clouds and Climate: towards a Holistic UnderStanding).

Community, Hardware, Software, Videos

Multi MAV Autonomous Flight

September 27, 2015 Danika Esden-Tempski

Rich Burton of Hooperfly made a video showcasing the flexibility and accuracy of the PaparazziUAV system running on the
1BitSquared Lisa/MX autopilot.

Using Paparazzi’s flight plan software to dictate a pattern of waypoints for three of his TeensyFly MAV’s to take off autonomously, hover, fly a rectangular pattern, hover and land. All the flight plan blocks are triggered in unison with a custom papget xml config file. The unison nature of their flight is quite beautiful to behold.

And a behind the scenes clip of a flying robot getting a little help from a friend. 🙂

Paparazzi UAV Blog