Wi-Fi setup#

Parrot Sphinx is able to create on your workstation a Wi-Fi access point attached to the simulated drone. This is particularly useful when a remote drone controller or smartphone application needs to be tested.

For this feature, the recommended hardware is an … ANAFI. The drone can actually be turned into a simple Wi-Fi access point 100% compatible with Parrot Sphinx. Still, a Wi-Fi USB dongle or an integrated Wi-Fi chipset may also work but the odds are not so high.

From the command line, you can configure the Wi-Fi link using the following parameters:

  • wifi_iface - details HERE

  • wifi_channel - details HERE

Trying with other Wi-Fi devices#

A Wi-Fi 802.11n/ac device supporting the AccessPoint (AP) / Infrastructure mode on your Linux distribution is required to access the simulated drone from your drone controller.

Note that the AP mode requirement is not so easily satisfied in practice. On Linux, the Wi-Fi driver also has to be based on the mac80211 driver framework in order to be compatible with hostapd.

To check if your current hardware supports the Access Point mode, you can type the following command and verify that the AP mode is present:

$ iw list | grep -A20 "Supported interface modes"
      Supported interface modes:
         * IBSS
         * managed
         * AP
         * AP/VLAN
         * monitor
         * mesh point
         * P2P-client
         * P2P-GO

If the AP mode is listed in the output of the command above, the Wi-Fi device could work fine with Parrot Sphinx…