Author: Kimberly McGuire

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Introducing our new team member: Kimberly

  2019-05-20  |     |    Leave a comment

At ICRA 2019

Hi, very nice to meet you all!  My name is Kimberly McGuire and I would like to introduce myself as the newest member of the Bitcraze team. Although I probably have never written anything bigger than a paragraph about myself before, but I will try my best to get you to know me a little better!

The first thing you should know about me is that I’m Dutch. I grew up in the Netherlands, which is a small little country that has fought for eternity against the sea and still managed to exist. If you do visit and would appreciate some impressive pieces of Civil Engineering,  don’t linger around in Amsterdam but  visit the “Delta werken” in the province of Zeeland or the ‘Afsluitdijk” in the north. But if you don’t like to take your chances near our oceans, ‘Utrecht’, ‘Groningen’ and ‘Maastricht are really nice to visit too! Probably my last name already gave it away, but I’m also half-American and I visit California almost once a year.

So, let’s talk about hobbies! I have played tennis for almost all my life (started when I was just 6 years old), and I’ve played competitively in tournaments and team-based competitions.  You can also find me skiing on some mountains at least once per year. In general, I really love visiting other countries and to experience the culture and, most importantly, the food. During my studies I’ve managed to go on extended stays abroad: I’ve spent a half a year in Santa Barbara, 3 months in Liverpool, a half a year in Tokyo. Talking about the latter: I’m a huge fan of pretty much everything related to Japan. All their food, Ghibli studios and other Japanese productions, the culture and people, and I do admit that I’m quite the karaoke addict. Moreover, I love going to the movies, playing videogames, and enjoying Dutch coziness, a.k.a. “gezelligheid”, with friends. 

To show in a slice of my educational background: for my Bachelor studies at the Delft University of Technology, I started out at Industrial Design Engineering. Here I learned everything there is to know about product development, from analyzing market-trends, creating concepts to finally to the full production process. For my Masters I was leaning more towards the technical side. After a bridging course to Mechanical engineering I went to do an M.Sc. in BioMecanical design with a specialization in Bio-Robotics (currently known  cognitive robotics). I ended developing a cerebellum-based stabilization system for a binocular robotic head (google “jaguar chicken commercial”:) ). After this, I came across a project at the MAVlab where I was allowed to work with tiny MAVs called pocket-drones, and the first thing I thought was ‘awesome!!’, however, that was before I realized that working with tiny MAVs was not a piece of cake.  I’m glad that the inner-geek in me kept me excited for 4 years straight, which is a crucial element or any PhD I believe, or any job!

So now a new chapter will start for me in Sweden. I hope that I will append to Bitcraze’s vision and I’m quite sure that they will teach me how to become a better hardware and software developer. I’m excited to start working with Arnaud, Marcus, Kristoffer and Tobias and develop more things that will make any’s inner-geek jump a little from excitement. At the moment of writing, we will be on ICRA in Montreal, Canada, so jump by booth 101 to say hi!

Light painting with Crazyflie and the Lighthouse deck

  2019-03-18  |     |    1 Comment

Last week we blogged about the early release version of the lighthouse deck and showed a nice push-around demo of the Crazyflies using the Vive controller. Now we wanted to push the system even further, by making a Lighthouse Painting!

We started by adding a LED-ring deck on the bottom of the CrazyFlie 2.1 with the lighthouse deck attached to the top. We were able to access the input of the track pad of the Vive controller and link it to a specific color / hue value. The LED ring can display any color possible in the RGB range, so in theory, you could paint in whatever color you like. For now, the brightness was fixed, but this could be easily added to the demo script as well.

To capture the light trace, we needed to make a long-exposure image, therefore, the flight arena need to stay completely dark. Luckily, this was easy to do for us since we do not have any windows in our new testing arena. Our camera is the Canon D5600 with a manually controlled shutter time setting selected (press to open the shutter and press again to close the shutter). The aperture setting was set at F-22. Nevertheless, this is very depended on the environment, so we had to do some trial-and-error in order to get this parameter right.

Aperture too wide… perfect!

Once we had the set-up finished, we made several long exposure photo paintings with one person controlling the camera and another painting the picture into thin air. Of course, the artist would need to imagine its creation, as we were not able to see the result until after the picture was taken. Also, big gestures were required in order to complete the painting, as the Crazyflie’s and the Vive controller’s movements were synced 1:1, so adding some multiplication factor would come in handy. Nonetheless, the results were amazing.

Some nice examples of a single crazyflie flying based on the Vive’s position, changing color based on the trackpad

We took it even further, by making the Crazyflie fly a predefined trajectory and planned color scheme without the Vive controller. First, it flew three concentric circles in green, red and blue with the high level commander with the PID controller setting. But, the circles would probably be closed-off more properly with the Mellinger controller setting. We also were able to reproduce the Bitcraze logo in the same fashion. In both long-exposure photos, it still possible to see the Crazyflie, as it is still traceable due to its routine LED functionality, so you can easily observe where it took off, and where it flew in between shapes.

The Crazyflie flying a predefined trajectory in several shapes

The demo python scripts of the above flights can be found here:

An we also took a video of the Bitcraze logo being drawn. The mobile phone camera had some problems focusing in the dark, but it gives a good idea of how things works: