Software Development

Introduction

While flying, the Parrot Bebop Quadcopter (and the Bebop 2 Quadcopter) stores all flight information in a log file. This is a so called pud file and has a json structure.

This pud file includes the detailed flight information which is also used by Parrot to store the flights in their cloud (formerly known as ARDrone Academy, Drone Academy) and to perfrom the flight analysis, such as generating battery plot, speed plot and altitude plot.

This application uses the DroneDataConversion library to do the flight data conversion. You can manage and store your Parrot Bebop flights and take care for visualising and organising the flight data.

Dev Environment — Tools

The whole application is written in Python 2.7 (did not get the step to Python3 yet) with platform independence in mind. I tried to keep the number of additional libraries to a minimum, however with increasing requirements the number of necessary libraries may increase.

Regarding the IDE, at first I started with Eclipse and the PyDev but recently I switched my whole tools and current projects to the WingIDE (Personal).

Features

Export as gpx and csv is available in the current version, export as kml is still in progress. Plotting speed, altitude and battery usage is done using matplotlib, visualising the track on a map is currently under development, in the current release it is done using geoplotlib. It is still not what I am after but right now it is sufficient.

The GUI is Tkinter based and it should run on every major operating system (including Windows, Linux, macOS).

General remarks

The reason why I started to write this application was the need to manage my flights offline and to export them to various formats. Additionally I wanted to have all the “Drone Academy” features on my Mac and not only on the phone.

This library is licensed under the Apache License Version 2, and is available via PyPI:

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/FlightReportManager/

Visit this project on Bitbucket:

https://bitbucket.org/flightreportmanagerteam/flightreportmanager

Download binary for macOS (extract, then right-klick on application and select open. Otherwise Gatekeeper will prevent execution, because the app is not signed):