Crazyradio 2.0

As already announced in a previous blog post, we have been working on a replacement for the Crazyradio PA. Crazyradio is the USB dongle used to communicate with Crazyflie 2.1, Crazyflie Bolt and any other 2.4GHz radio board we are making. We are also visiting FOSDEM in Brussels at the end of the week and will organize a community dev-meeting about Crazyradio and communication end of February: more on that at the end of the post.

Crazyradio 2.0 will have the following characteristics:

  • Based on the nordic-semiconductor nRF52840
    • 64MHz Cortex-M4
    • 1024KB flash, 256KB ram
    • Radio supporting Nordic protocol, Bluetooth low energy as well as IEEE802.15.4
    • 1Mbps and 2Mbsp bitrate to Crazyflie
    • USB full speed (12Mbps) device
  • Radio power amplifier providing up to +20dBm output power
  • ‘Drag and drop’ bootloader with physical button to start in bootloader mode
  • Same debug port as on the Crazyflie for ease of development

One of the main changes versus the Crazyradio PA will be the available CPU power and ease of development: this will allow to experiment with and implement much more advanced communication protocol like channel hopping and peer-to-peer communication.

On the software side, there will be two modes available for Crazyradio 2.0: a compatibility mode that emulate a Crazyradio PA and should work with all existing software as well as a new Crazyradio mode that will have a much improved USB protocol allowing for more efficient communication when controlling multiple Crazyflie as well as making it easy to support more protocols in the future.

These two modes will be available as two different firmware and the user can ‘drag and drop’ the firmware with the wanted mode.

As for the Crazyradio PA (version 1), sourcing the components for it has been a bit challenging lately. We will sell Crazyradio PA as long as we have stock for it and the software will continue to support it for the foreseeable future.

Announcements

Kimberly and I, Arnaud, will be visiting the FOSDEM conference at the end of the week in Brussels. If you are there too and want to meet us do not hesitate to drop a message in the comment there, in Github discussions or by mail. It would be great to meet fellow Crazyflie users!

We are also planning an online dev-meeting about Crazyradio 2.0 and communication the 22nd of February 2023. The information about joining will be on Github Discussions. We are interested in talking, and bouncing ideas about radio and communication protocol: with the new Crazyradio we have an opportunity to work on communication protocols to improve them and makes them more useful to modern use of the Crazyflie.

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