Following firmware releases we have now released a new version for the Crazyflie client and python lib (cflib). It took a bit more time to test and fix various last minute bugs but we now have released Crazyflie client 2020.09 as well as Crazyflie lib 0.12.1.
Crazyflie python lib 0.12.1
The main new funcitonalities of the lib are:
- Python 2.x support is now dropped. Python 2 official support has ended beginning of this year and it is not installed by default in Ubuntu 20.04, it was time to stop supporting it in cflib
- Some documentation work
- Capabilities to abort a bootloading operation
Crazyflie client 2020.09
There has been a brunch of cosmetic and functional changes in the client. Some themes have been added so that the client can now be used with a dark blue or even green-on black hacker theme. The used Qt theme has also been forced to be drawn by Qt on all platforms: this means that the client will not look like a Windows or Mac app on Windows and Mac, but the styling will be consistent on all platform. This will simplify development and make documentation consistent with all platform.
The bootloader has been changed to automatically download releases of the firmware from Github by default. This is a great quality of life feature made by victor this summer that makes it very easy to run Crazyflies with a clean release build.
There are also a brunch of bugfixes, the full changelog can be read on the release page.
Future plans
Semantic versioning for the lib
We have been thinking of using semantic versioning for the lib and bumping the version to 1.0. This will allow us to communicate the state of the lib more accurately: it is not perfect but it is perfectly usable. As well giving more freedom to break compatibility. A lot of things could be made better but we are always very careful not breaking backwards compatibility. Proper semantic versioning would allow us to make a Crazyflie client lib 2.0 making it clear that if you update from 1.0 to 2.0 you might have to make changes to your scripts.
Client binary release for more platform
So far, the Crazyflie client has had a binary release for Windows and some work to make one for MacOS. By Binary release we mean releasing the client in a form that does not require installing python, and then the crazyflie client pip package, on Windows it is an installer and on Mac it would be an app bundle.
Last week we have also been working on Linux releases, after all most of us uses Linux at Bitcraze so we might as well show it some love. Today we have released a snap of Crazyflie client. This means that you can install Crazyflie client from the Ubuntu software application on Ubuntu, or directly via the snap install –edge cfclient command on any Linux system with snap installed. There is still some rough edges, and a stable version will only be available for next release, but this should make it much easier to get started with the Crazyflie.