Year: 2023

2023 has already begun, and we have some ideas and hopes on what this new year will mean for Bitcraze. Of course, what 2022 has proven to us is that the world is unpredictable; but it doesn’t stop us from dreaming about our future. So here is what’s in our wishlist for 2023!

Products

We dedicated a good part of the winter to get a new, updated and better Crazyradio, that we will present to you sometime this year. Rumor around the office is that it will solve all problems you can think of, related to communication!

And, even though it’s been a long run, we hope to soon get the Big Quad deck and Bolt out of early access. There are still some things to tweak and documentation to write.

The Nimble + should arrive soon in the store, a drone with flapping wings powered by the Bolt and designed by our friends at Flapper Drones.

Prototypes

There’s always a drawer at Bitcraze that’s full of ideas and prototypes. What we lack to make them come true is time ! We are constantly wondering which of those treasures that will be our next product, and I can’t say anything is for certain, but to give you some ideas, we’ve been playing around with the idea of a brushless Crazyflie, a Glow deck, and are definitely updating some of our current decks.

Community

We really enjoyed meeting people at fairs once again after 2 years of staying put. We don’t know at which conference you will be able to catch us (yet), but we’ll most definitely attend at least 2.

And we will not loose track of our users and hope to get feedback and input as much as possible during our dev meetings or even mini-BAMs.

Bitcraze

We’re still actively looking for teammates, and we hope there’s someone out there that will join us in 2023! Send us a CV if you’re interested.

External dependencies

The components crisis hit us hard in 2020, but it seems we’re gradually coming back to normal. While the world is still full of surprises, we’re happy to have enough stability to still be doing what we like, through pandemics or recessions. Of course, we much rather prefer when things are a little less exciting! We’re cautiously optimistic about 2023, hoping that wars will end and that awareness about climate change will bring out the right habits.

Soon we will have our quarterly meeting, where we try to herd and select our passions and ideas into conceivable plans and actions.

We’re never sure if one year is enough to see all of our plans and hopes go through, but 2023 is still brand new with a lot of possibilities, that we plan to grab with passion. May this new year bring you excitement and passion too!

It’s the end of the year, and as usual, it’s time to be a little nostalgic and look back at what happened at Bitcraze during the last 12 months.

Community

2022 marked the easing out of the pandemic; and we finally got the opportunity to do onsite, physical conferences for the first time since 2020.

First, it was Kimberly alone that spend some time in the spring to visit some of our users across labs in Europe (we called it the Grand Tour). Then we visited IMAV, in the Netherlands, were we saw an amazing competition involving the AI deck. We actually also had the Crazyflie feature in an hackathon in Stockholm, in June.

But the conferences we’ve been longing for the most, and that took a good chunk of our time, was IROS and ROSCon in Japan. Preparations were intense, and for the first time, all of us were gone during one week ! Our intern Marios worked on the demo during the summer, and we presented a fully autonomous demo. We were really glad to spend time in this beautiful country to show our stuff, meeting people and discover new ways researchers use the Crazyflie.

We also had our very first Mini BAM, with Flapper Drones and CollMot. Worth of note, Mark Robber used the Crazyflie as a glitter dispenser in his latest video, in which he designed the drone to fly (without a positioning system!) from a box where it charged all the time.

Guest blog posts

And since we had more opportunities to meet our customers, we also had some interesting visits on our blog !

Software

We worked on 5 releases this year!

We finally got the AI deck out of early access, with new improved infrastructure. We even got a nice example of using the AI deck for CRTP over WiFi (via CPX) !

We also spent some time on our positioning systems. One big win at the beginning of the year was to add the possibilities to have more than 2 base stations with Lighthouse. We also improved the Lighthouse geometry estimation. But Lighthouse was not the only one to receive our love, we worked on scaling up the The Loco positioning system that was nicely demonstrated in the New Year’s video.

Kimberly created a nice simulation model for the Crazyflie, now officially available in Gazebo. We also switched to K-build. And the development of Crazyswarm2 and implementation of ROS2 took (and is still talking) some time.

Hardware

We got new motors and propellers for increased thrust , they are now available in the store! For the first time, we will also have a product made and designed by a third party, namely the Nimble + designed by Flapper Drones. I heard that the Christmas elves are working hard to get it to us soon !

We also had some upgrades on the Lighthouse, SD-card and Biq-Quad deck.

This last couples of month, we also dedicated a lot of time on a new Crazyradio and new communication architecture.

Documentation

After 10 years of loyal services, we retired the forum, in favor of github discussions. We also improved the client with CFclient: GUI, Lighthouse and Bolt improvements and some debug Tools.

Bitcraze

A lot changed here too ! Jonas left and Arnaud took his parental leave, so with 2 men short we felt quite under staffed… That’s why we started looking for new Bitcrazers to join the team.

Thankfully, some people joined in, though temporarily. Marios worked here during the summer, and Victor joined us part time to help out too.

As usual, it’s always nice to see all the things we’ve done in the span of one year, and we’re happy with the progress we’ve made in 2022!