This week we wanted to reflect on the progress that has been made lately in the Crazyflie ecosystem which will lead to bigger and better Crazyflie Swarms.
Radio communication
Like pointed out in the last blog post about Building a Crazyflie Flower Swarm with Rust, the new Rust Crazyflie library together with the new Crazyradio 2.0 has improved connection time and link efficiency by quite a bit.
It is now possible to connect swarms of multiple dozens of Crazyflies in seconds using a single radio and then make them fly while still getting position telemetry. So many Crazyflie on one radio does limit the maximum bandwidth per Crazyflie, but it does now work in a stable way!
Color LED deck
The recently released Color LED deck is a great addition to the ecosystem towards swarm. Its predecessor, the Led-ring Deck, has been used a lot by researchers to indicate state of individual Crazyflies in a Swarm. The Color LED Deck improves on that by providing a diffuser that allows to see the color from the side. This allows to mark states of big groups of Crazyflie much more clearly.
As a bonus, the Color LED Deck is very usable in other field like art and shows since it is much more visible and can be used to fly Crazyflies as “Flying Pixels”.
Autonomous landing and charging
Last year, we have released a Crazyflie 2.1 Brushless charging dock. This is a produced version of an idea we have been using with Crazyflie 2.1 and the Qi deck for years at fairs and conferences. It allows Crazyflies to autonomously land and charge. It is not only great for autonomous drone demos and shows but it also is a great waiting spots for swarms when doing research: the charging dock keeps the swarm charged so that when it is time to take off all the individuals starts with the same battery level.
Future endeavors
On the radio side there are still areas that would bring great improvement on communication stability. We are for example working on a channel-hopping communication protocol that should make the connection mostly immune to regular interference on 2.4GHz.
We are also working at improving other parts of swarm management, this includes for example solving the problem of flashing a full swarm of Crazyflie with the same firmware: we may be able to use broadcast messages more in order to drastically speed up the process instead of flashing the Crazyflie one per one.
Overall, working on bigger swarms allows us to work on the full stack and to make the Crazyflie a better drone for everybody.