Start here

This site is a working record of one Parrot Bebop 2 FPV pack, taken apart on a bench with the propellers off. It holds what we measured, what we read out of the firmware, the small tool we wrote to talk to the drone from a computer, and a clear line between what we have checked and what we only suspect.

The newest firmware for the Bebop 2 was built in June 2018, and the tooling around it has aged since in a few different directions. The ROS driver stopped at ROS 1, Parrot’s modern Python library only supports their newer ANAFI line, the popular community library has not had a commit since 2020, and the original phone app is hard to find. A Bebop 2 is still a good aircraft to learn on, and it is still an open book if you know where to look, so the notes here are written for someone who wants to understand it and talk to it in the present day.

Where to begin

If you have never done this before, read the FPV pack first. It explains the three pieces in the box and how they find each other, which makes everything else easier to follow. Then first contact walks through joining the drone’s network and reading its telemetry without sending it a single flight command.

The rest of the site fills in as the notes get written up. The lab notebook is the raw material behind everything else: dated, unpolished, and honest about what is still a question.

How we label things

A claim on this site is only as good as its evidence, so we try to say which kind it is. Something is verified when we checked it against a file, a byte, a capture from the drone, or a second independent route that lands on the same answer. Something is unverified when it is somebody’s reading that we have not re-derived, which includes our own early drafts. When a first draft turned out wrong, we keep it and say what replaced it, because the wrong turns are often the useful part.

Props off

Everything in the Start here section works with the propellers removed, and that is how we did all of it. A Bebop 2 will spin up its motors on a command, and the first time you talk to a new piece of software is the wrong moment to find out what it sends.