2018 has ended, we at Bitcraze are now back from a short holiday break and we are looking forward to 2019. There is already a lot of things rolling that will give results in 2019 and we wanted to do a short post about what we are currently planning.
Product wise, we still have a couple of product in final state of production that we will be releasing during Q1 or early Q2 2019, Crazyflie 2.1 production is on-going and we have started a first batch of the Lighthouse deck.
We have talked about both projects in previous post but if you want to see what the lighthouse positioning is capable of you can look at the Holiday video we pushed two weeks ago:
This video was made using two HTC Vive base station V1 and prototypes of the lighthouse deck we are currently producing. We intend this deck to be the first version of a series of Lighthouse receiver deck: we had to simplify the design by using only horizontal IR receivers in order to be able to produce a first batch now, this meant making some compromises on the usable flight space. We will talk more on that in a future block post but as you can see in the video the system is promising.
We will also try to travel a bit more this year to meet you. IROS 2018 was an awesome experience and allowed us to meet a lot of our users and to get a better understanding on how Crazyflie is and can be used. This year we are aiming at visiting Fosdem 2019 in Brussels as well as exhibiting at ICRA 2019 in Montreal and IROS 2019 in Macau. None of them are completely finalized yet so stay tuned on the blog for future announcement. If you have other suggestion of conferences or event you would like to see us attending, please tell us in the comments or drop us an mail.
Finally on a company side, we are looking at growing the team and changing office. We are currently 5 at Bitcraze which means that we have a lot to do and growing would allow us to expand the Crazyflie ecosystem with more functionality and cool stuff. We are also going to move to a new office where we will have a dedicated flight lab. Until now we have had our office in a co-working space and we used about 4x4m of our office space as a flight lab. In the new office we will have a dedicated 100m² flight space which will allow us to work more on swarm support and to improve the LPS system in a bigger space.