Bitcraze at FOSDEM 16 and flying pixel

2016-01-25 | Arnaud | Leave a comment

At the end of the week Marcus and I are going at the FOSDEM 16 conference in Brussels. There we will meet Fred, who is the main community developer and maintainer of the Crazyflie Android app. If you also visit FOSDEM and want to meet 2/5th of Bitcraze, let us know!

Fred, like last year, is going to have a lightning talk about Crazyflie. You find him in the schedule. We look forward to seeing it!

Edit: We’re really excited to see a second talk about the Crazyflie 2.0. AdaCore will be talking about their work on re-implementing the firmware to SPARK (more info here).

Finally, as you might know, at Bitcraze we try to have fun Fridays. This means that we reserve Fridays for more personal project that are fun and would not get prioritized otherwise. For example the DWM Local Positioning System started as a Friday project as well as the led ring deck (it was for Crazyflie 1 back then, with a neopixel-ring).

Last Friday Björn tried to make a flying pixel. The idea is to enclose Crazyflie in a white paper box and to use the led-ring to light it in the air. We think that would look great with the local positioning system :-). To be honest what we ended up with is not fully working yet (we have a lot of problems making it fly), but we have ideas for next Friday and at least it looks quite nice already:

Local positioning system alpha program launch

2016-01-18 | Arnaud | 7 Comments

As we have written before we are working on a DWM100-based ultra-wide-band local positioning system, we are making good progress and are getting ready to ship alpha systems. We hope to be able to ship in the following weeks. We aim at shipping these alpha system to anyone interested to test it early.

The alpha anchors and DWM deck will be very close to our expected final system. We are in the process of pushing the source code for it on GitHub, it will have open-source public code before we ship the first system.

We have now stocked enough DWM1000 modules and we are ordering the final PCB design for the anchor. This would allow early access to the technology and for us we would be able to get feedback. We are planning on selling the anchors around 100USD each and the DWM decks 70USD. The price is taking into account that we are manually soldering, testing and shipping ourselves. If you are interested to get access early please contact us (you can find the contact email on the contact page).

We have just made a quick and dirty video tour of our basement/autonomour flight lab. This was shot in one take so it is a bit messy, but our goal was to show our current state. We are using the Crazyflie python client training mode with the automatic controller as a student. This is why I keep the gamepad in my hand most of the time: the first flight is done with me controlling thrust and yaw, the controller controls roll and pitch. The second flight is fully autonomous but I still could take-over control by pressing a button. On a side note these tests are showing how good it is to have a lightweight and robust quadcopter like the crazyflie: the Crazyflie you see in the video has crashed countless time this last mount in the basement, I have not yet changed the motor mounts nor any other part on it.

Open website

2016-01-11 | Kristoffer Richardsson | 2 Comments

There has been much discussion at bitcraze on where to put informations, forum or website. The website is more pretty and more accessible but it can only be updated by us. The wiki can be updated by anyone but it is less accessible and tend to contains much more details. We now solved this debate!

I’m happy to announce that in the spirit of open source and collaborative work, we have published the source code and content for our website on github. It is now possible for anyone to contribute to the website through pull requests on github, so if you want to add, updated or remove something, please go ahead! The code contains all static content, while the blog is still handled by a WordPress instance that lives elsewhere.

We have tried to make it as easy as possible to work with the code, start a server and see your changes in a browser – check out the “quick start” in the readme.md for details. Most of the content is still in html, but we are aiming at converting as much as possible to markdown over time. We hope that it will make it more accessible and super easy for everyone to work with the site.

Happy updating! And please tell us what you think about this new website.

The deck API: run your code in Crazyflie 2.0

2016-01-05 | Arnaud | 1 Comment

First of all, happy new year on behalf of the Bitcraze team. In this post we would like to talk about the Deck API, but first a little bit of background.

Crazyflie and pretty much all we do is open-source. The main reason is that we want to share and allow everyone to build upon what we are doing. The first Crazyflie was expendable with an expansion port but modifying it was hard because it required good soldering skills. However if we really want others to build and use what we do, we had to increase the usability. So, when designing Crazyflie 2.0 we put a lot of efforts into making it easily expendable. We ended up with the deck port, which makes it easily to add an expansion board, called a deck, on top or bottom of the Crazyflie 2.0. An installed deck will automatically be detected and initialized when the Crazyflie starts thanks to the one-wire memory they contain. Finally we have also made the breakout and prototype deck to help making new decks.

With all this, we believe we managed to make it much easier to create a new deck. However making the firmware driver for these decks still required to understand a lot about how our firmware is architectured. It also did require to add code to multiple files to ensure the driver runs properly. The new deck API aims at making the firmware driver development more straightforward.

The base of the deck API is the driver declaration: it is possible to add a deck driver without having to modify any code in the firmware. The driver just has to be compiled and it will be automatically loaded at Crazyflie startup. This is inspired by the way the Linux kernel is loading modules and drivers. So the minimal driver can be written in 12 lines of code:

#define DEBUG_MODULE "HelloDeck"
#include "debug.h"
#include "deck.h"

/* init function */
static void helloInit()
{
 DEBUG_PRINT("Hello Crazyflie 2.0 deck world!\n");
}

/* Driver registration */
static const DeckDriver helloDriver = {
 .name = "myHello",
 .init = helloInit,
};
DECK_DRIVER(helloDriver);

In this example, the driver will be initialized automatically if a deck is installed with the name “myHello”. It is also possible to force the driver initialization. For more information there is a documentation for this on the wiki and there is also a short howto that will guides you from zero to having your code running in Crazyflie.

There is also an implementation of the digital and analog input/output API similar to Arduino.

There is a lot of work left on the deck API. Among other things:

Easy shortcut to run tasks: currently the only way to run a task is to create one using the FreeRTOS API. The plan is to provide easy to use timers and an Arduino-like loop function.
More drivers for SPI, Serial, I2C, …
Access to other parts of the system like controlling the flight setpoint or setting the LEDs.

The two first are quite straightforward and ‘just’ need to be done. We are not so sure how to implement the last one yet (we need a good way to modularise the firmware). If you have any input on things you would like to see in the API please contact us, the forum is good for discussion and a ticket in the firmware github project for functionality. You are also welcome to help-out with the implementation, documentation or reporting bug :-).

Crazyflie autonomous with DWM1000-based local positioning system

2015-12-28 | Arnaud | 16 Comments

We are currently working on a local positioning system based on ultra wide band decawave DWM1000 modules for the Crazyflie. We have already written a couple of times about it earlier, and in this post I will describe where we are now. We will also start making a wiki page and add more about the experimentation in the future.

During the end of year 2015, we have made some progress! We just moved to a new office and we now have a local positioning lab in the basement, where we are able to fly a Crazyflie 2.0 autonomously using the local positioning and keeping clear from the walls (I would like to say to keep a stable position, but we are not there yet :-).

As we have shown in previous posts we have electronic boards for the anchors, and the Crazyflie deck:

We have setup 6 anchors at our office. The configuration is designed to maximize the trilateration precision in the middle of the room. The ranging is done by the crazyflie and then communicated to the ground using the log subsytem. The ROS crazyflie driver receives the ranging and send it to the trilateration algorithm, a particle filter. We can then display the estimated position and use the position to control the Crazyflie position:

In order to try to fly autonomously, we have been trying the controller included with the Crazyflie ros driver. We also connected ROS via ZMQ to our python client and the controller we made to fly autonomously with the Kinect. Both work but are far from perfect: they have been tuned for a pretty stable measurement (from a Vicon system or a Kinect) and the output of the particle filter is a bit noisy, mostly for the altitude. We are looking at improving the position control loop and adding sensor fusion for positioning in the Crazyflie 2.0.

Early 2016 will be time to finalize the DWM1000-based local positioning system to be able to distribute it. We are currently writing an open-source C driver for the DW1000 chip and we are finalizing the anchors electronic design. If you are interested in getting such system do not hesitate to contact us, as we are finalizing the design, any input is interesting so that we end up with a system that is easy to use and to setup.

“Getting started” with Christmas

2015-12-21 | Björn Mauritz | 2 Comments

If you are one of the lucky ones getting a Crazyflie for Christmas we are happy to tell you there is a new and fresh “getting started” guide to help you get going :-).

Before going on holiday me and Kristoffer published an updated version for the “getting started” part of the website which we are very happy about. Besides making a new edition of the “Assembling” part we have also added “Installing on a smartphone”, “Installing on a computer” and “Flying”.

We are hoping that these new additions for the “Getting started” section will be a big help for everybody who just got a Crazyflie for Christmas and feel unsure about how to start. Also this is an additional way to help people finding out if the Crazyflie is right for them, who otherwise might feel uncertain about buying one or not.

If you have any comments or suggestions about the new “Getting started” please feel free to contribute we are always open to ideas about improvements and tweaks.

It’s been a hectic time here att Bitcraze before Christmas with new decks coming out and the ongoing re-design of the website among others. So we are all taking some time off during the holidays but we will be answering email and support issues. However it might take a bit longer time since we will be occupied with drinking swedish glögg, french wine and stuffing ourselves with chocolate.

Crazyflie 2.0 back in stock

2015-12-18 | Kristoffer Richardsson | Leave a comment

We are happy to announce that the Crazyflie 2.0 is back in stock at our main distributor Seeed. Head over to the on line shop and buy your last minute Christmas presents!

We are looking forward to welcome more happy pilots, makers, researchers, developers and creative, curious users to our community!

New decks heading into production

2015-12-14 | Marcus | 2 Comments

After a hectic week we’re finally ready to put some new decks into production! A couple of months ago we selected 4 deck prototypes to try to bring to production before Christmas: WiFi, GPS, BigQuad and the Buzzer. After working hard on them during the last months, we’re now ready to release the Buzzer and BigQuad decks. Last week we ordered the first batches and the product pages and descriptions are being written this week. We’ll push out more information about the boards as it gets available, so stay tuned!

Below is a few quick shots of the latest prototypes:

[Show as slideshow]

So what happened to the GPS and the WiFi decks? The latest prototypes are working, but there’s still some minor issues. So instead of moving to production with the current design, we’re doing one last prototype iteration and launching the boards early next year.

On a related note we’ve been working hard together with Seeedstudio to get some more Crazyflie 2.0s into stock before Christmas. Not so surprisingly we’re not the only ones rushing to produce. But thanks to lots of efforts from Seeedstudios side the Crazyflie 2.0 will be back in stock in a couple of days!

Battery issues and Crazyflie 2.0 out of stock

2015-12-07 | Marcus | 3 Comments

cf2 front rosette It’s that time of year again, time for Christmas shopping. This year we thought that we would plan ahead and produce more units before Christmas to meet the demand. It was a great plan, but there were some hick-ups on the way. Originally the plan was that a fresh batch of Crazyflie 2.0’s would be rolling out of production right around now and being available in the Seeedstudio bazaar. But unfortunately we’ve only managed to get a small part of the batch out. And since demand is high before Christmas they were all sold out immediately. But we’re working hard to get the remaining part of the batch ready. The new time-plan is for the units to be finished around Christmas, which means they might not have time to ship to customers and be ready to get unwrapped by happy geeks around the world. But there’s still a chance to get a great present for your fellow geek (or maybe your own inner geek), check out our list of local distributors.

On another note we’re having some issues with shipment of spare batteries from China. New shipping and customs regulations have made it very expensive to ship spare batteries that are not included in products. Normally several orders of products are bundled together when doing the shipping/customs from Seeedstudio, but each battery now has to be handled separately with it’s own declaration and paperwork .We’re trying to find a way around this issue, but until then the spare battery at Seeedstudio will be listed as out of stock. If anyone has any tips on how to solve the issue, please let us know.

New website in progress

2015-11-30 | Björn Mauritz | 2 Comments

Some of you might have noticed that the website is getting a make-over which we are very happy about. Me and Kristoffer have teamed-up and first and foremost replaced the old wordpress theme with an new bootstrap-based theme. Choosing a new theme can be quite a hassle since there is literally a jungle of themes out there.

So we finally settled for a simple theme that was easily modifiable and decided to basically strip it and starting to create our own design. So while I’ve been doing wireframes for the next version of the website, Kristoffer have been turning bootstrap inside out and started to make the old content responsive.

We have also modified the architecture of the websites content and started to clean up all the different pages. When discussing the new website we have talked a lot about how to make the site more engaging and how to better meet our users’ needs, which have been super fun but is also a complex task. One of our ideas which we are in the middle of evolving is to create what we call “gates”. The gates will be pages based on different users needs and contain material and guidance we think the user will benefit from the most, as an example maybe one gate will be named “research” or something similar and be especially tailored for scientists and researchers. That’s it for now, if you want please leave a comment about what you think of the design so far, or if you have any ideas regarding the “gates”.

Information architecture-workshop for the new website :-).