Connecting to Anafi via WiFi router

Hey All,

I’m trying to control my Parrot Anafi with a Linux Computer running a MAVSDK (formerly DronecodeSDK) application. This Linux Computer however doesn’t itself connect to the drone’s WiFi, it instead has a 5GHz TP-Link CPE-510 WiFi router configured in client mode that I’m using to connect instead.

The problem that I’m having comes in where the Computer (at 192.168.42.12) cannot even ping the Drone’s 192.168.42.1 address directly. However the WiFi router (at 192.168.42.7) has a built-in ping tool on its GUI, which can directly ping the Drone.

I’ve already spent an hour on the phone with the TP-Link tech support, thinking it was an issue with their router, to no avail. Plus, if I set up a connection from one WiFi router to another one in AP mode, the computer can ping devices on the other side no problem.

Is there some kind of firewall on Anafi that inhibits the use of a networked router and instead prefers a direct network connection between it and its controller?

EDIT: In the meantime, I’m trying to see about getting a USB WiFi adapter up and running on the Linux Computer to see if I can bypass this completely

Thanks,
Mitchell

I continued the path described in the EDIT above, and I can get a connection that way. But it is not ideal for my use because that is on the 2.4GHz band, and I would still like to find a resolution for the root issue.

Furthermore, does anybody know what the default UDP port to send commands to is? According to MAVSDK DEFAULT_UDP_PORT the default UDP port for MAVLink is 14540, but I can’t seem to get a connection with it at udp://192.168.42.1:14540.

Additionally, I can open up a mplayer rtsp stream at rtsp://192.168.42.1/live, which I think equates to rtsp://192.168.42.1:554 but I’m not sure

Hi,

As far as I know, you are uncharted territory here.

There is no firewall of any kind on the Anafi, however the Anafi DHCP server does not give a default gateway address in its DHCP reply. This is done on purpose to prevent the controller device (a phone running FreeFlight 6) from trying to access the internet through the drone AP. Since the drone controller is usually directly connected to the drone, that’s usually not a problem.

In your case, you’ll probably have to configure the route manually on the router.

Unfortunately, Anafi does not (yet) expose a Mavlink UDP endpoint. You’ll have to stick to the Parrot GroundSDK for now.

Regards

Nicolas