Bosch developed MEMS sensor deck for the Crazyflie

At FOSDEM 2016 we met someone from Bosch Sensortec, he was very interested by the Crazyflie and got one. Apparently his college liked the Crazyflie too because soon later we where contacted by Bosch that wanted to make a deck for the Crazyflie containing a brunch of there sensor. We have been tweeting about this board before and now we just pushed the drivers for some of the sensors into the Crazyflie main branch.

The deck has an impressive list of sensor onboard:

  • BMI055: 6 Axis gyro and accelerometer, with closed loop technology gyroscope
  • BMI160: 6 Axis gyro and accelerometer
  • BMM150: 3 Axis magnetometer
  • BMP285: Pressure sensor
  • BME680: Environmental sensor (air, pressure, humidity, temperature).

Thats a lot of data, and there is also an non-populated footprint for a BMF055 which is a BMI055 and an Atmel ARM Cortex-M0 in the same package, this is something that could be very interesting to play with in the future. The drivers and the integration are still in early stage but what has been pushed so far is support for the BMI055 and BMI160. We look forward to tuning those sensors and testing the others as well!

Bosch has made most of the work with this deck them selves and we have provided mainly guidance and support, a big benefit of open source! That has been working great and it has been very fun working with them. We are not sure if this is going to be part of a product yet, as in releasing a deck full of sensors. Please tell us what you think and if anyone would have use for such deck.

6 comments on “Bosch developed MEMS sensor deck for the Crazyflie

    • This is not planned for the Crazyflie 2.0, but this kind of board is definitely an opportunity to test new sensors!

  • I am a little confused. Doesn’t the crazyflie 2.0 already have all these sensors? (different brand, of course, but still..). What would be the difference here? Would bosch sensors be more reliable?

    • Crazyflie has been design as a versatile platform for research, development, and fun :-). Testing new sensors is one of the thing we where actually thinking about when making it. In this case it can be interesting for Bosch to attach the sensor on a ready-to-fly platform to test and demonstrate the performances of the sensors.

      For us it is an opportunity to test new sensors, we have not experimented too much the performances yet but we will. I think it might be interesting for others as well (like trying to merge different sensors together).

  • We have plans to release a bosch sensor deck (simplified compare to the above) but still only plans. If you want one now I think the fastest way forward is to develop a deck yourself.

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