Quadcopter AR.Drone - announced a regular GPS receiver. Finally!

Starting with the release of the quadrocopter AR.Drone 2.0 from Parrot, its owners suffered from the lack of a GPS receiver in it, which prevented the drone from knowing its location, and also did not allow to implement such a function as an automatic return to the take-off location. Of course, model airplanes and enthusiasts were not idle, but found ways to connect custom GPS modules to AR.Drone 2.0 via onboard USB. This required certain dances with firmware drivers. But this year, the AR.Drone manufacturing company - Parrot announced a regular GPS receiver called Flight Recorder.
This is a device connected to the drone, which has 4GB of memory, a GPS receiver, adds the possibility of flying along a route and much more.

Until now, in order to connect to the AR.Drone GPS, it was necessary to be engaged in flashing the drone’s USB drivers and / or connecting the Arduino to it, invading the delicate inner world of the drone, which was mainly a matter of desperate enthusiasts. After thinking about the popularity of such mods, the company Parrot, apparently decided that this is a useful feature and announced the release of its own device for navigation. Obviously, releasing AR.Drone 3.0 (or 2.0s? And now it is fashionable ...) for this function is hardly worth it, they decided to release the device as a plug-in. Fortunately, there is a USB port onboard the drone. Initially, the USB port was intended solely for connecting external USB drives to record a video flight on them. Now USB is used to connect the GPS module. In this case, the module itself contains a 4GB flash drive, so it solves both tasks at once - GPS navigation and external flash drive. And, judging by the description, the module itself contains an input USB socket, which allows you to insert another flash drive, if someone does not have enough 4GB available. The module installed in the drone was shown at the past CES 2013 and looks like this. Following the traditions of aviation black boxes, it has a bright orange color.


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Using GPS, flight data transmitted to AR.Drone Academy will include coordinates, so that the flight path will be displayed in 3-dimensional form.
What is interesting is that Parrot has never stated that it is going to implement the function of returning the drone to the take-off place in its applications.

A nice addition to the module is that it is compatible with the MAVLink protocol and, as a result, can be integrated with open-loop systems such as QGroundControl. And this makes it possible with the help of applications under Windows / Linux / Mac OS to create routes for a drone to fly offline. So now you can safely scare your neighbors or launch drones to patrol the area (I'm already thinking about how it can be used in airsoft). Also, apparently, we should expect an update of the AR.Drone API to enable the program to work with the module.

I am personally personally afraid of the fact that the module looks quite thick. Coupled with the fact that a regular battery runs only 12 minutes (this is according to the passport, in fact about 8 minutes), then AR.Drone often uses an extended power battery at 2300mAh (instead of the regular one at 1000mAh), which itself is also thick. Therefore, it is a question how a new module will be installed when using an extended battery. Whether the standard cover will close at the same time is not clear, it may be necessary to increase the size of the cavity with the help of a cutting tool.

Let's combine the new module only with AR.Drone 2.0, since In the first version of the drone there is no USB. The price of the module and the release date are not yet known, as is the detailed specification of the device. But on the official website, you can subscribe to the notification of the availability of the module for the order.

And to complete, the video from the official site: