The Bitcraze Virtual Machine is designed as a quick and isolated way to start development with Crazyflie and other bitcraze projects.
The current VM is starting to get very old, even though we keep it updated it is based on XUbuntu LTS 14.04. This month Ubuntu LTS 18.04 is being release which is a good reason to upgrade the VM!
The main update will then to switch from XUbuntu 14.04 to XUbuntu 18.04. There is a couple more things that we are looking at updating:
- Updating Eclipse and CDT to the latest version Oxygen.3a
- Fixing Eclipse code completion and hinting configuration
- Pre-configuring eclipse with gnu-mcu-eclipse to make it easier to flash and debug Crazyflie.
- Updating KiCad to the latest stable version 4
- Fixing the virtual machine Crazyradio communication bugs
We are writing this blog post as a request for comment:
- Is there anything else that you would like to add/remove in the new virtual machine?
- Anything we could do to make it easier to start developing for Crazyflie?
The virtual machine is generated automatically using packer and VirtualBox, the code is hosted on GitHub. If you want to help making the VM or want functionality to be added to it do not hesitate to open a ticket in the bug tracker.