Crazyradio: past, present and future

2017-05-02 | Arnaud | 9 Comments

The past

The Crazyradio has been designed as a radio dongle to control the original Crazyflie 1. It is based on a Nordic Semiconductor nRF24LU1. It is basically the radio from Crazyflie 1, the nRF24L01, with a microcontroller and a USB device peripheral. Crazyradio has been designed from the beginning to be extended for other used: the code is completely open-source, can be powered with 12V and has an expansion port with possibility of implementing a serial port to communicate with the radio.

When we designed Crazyflie 2.0, we extended Crazyradio to make Crazyradio PA. It is basically the same hardware but we just added a power amplifier to make sure Crazyradio is transmitting with the same power as competing radio in the same 2.4GHz band: Wifi and Bluetooth. Crazyflie 2.0 is not using an nRF24 chip anymore but an nRF51822 which integrates a microcontroller and implements bluetooth low energy as well as nRF24 compatible radio.

The present

The Crazyradio (PA) has been used for a couple of hack like our glove controller. Another popular use has been by security researcher to experiment with the security of wireless mouse and keyboard. Indeed the nRF24 serie of chip is extensively used in wireless mouse, keyboard and even quadcopters ;).

We are often very quiet about the Crazyradio since ‘it just works’. It does not means that it is finished or perfect, there is actually a lot that was planned to make the radio link more efficient, to be able to control more Crazyflie per Crazyradio, etc… Some of this work has been done in the context of the Crazyswarm project by Wolfgang from USC but a lot more could be done. One of the main blockers for Crazyradio development is that it is based on a very old microcontroller, an 8051, and that it does not have a safe bootloader or (open) debugging access. It means that each modification is potentially a big commitment in time and since the radio already work quite well it is hard to put much time in it.

The absence of a safe bootloader means that if you flash a firmware that crashes, you will need an SPI programmer to recover the radio in working mode. This makes it quite stressful to work with the radio. However there are a couple of programmers made for this and we recently published a Hackster project about using a Raspberry Pi to recover the bootloader:

The future

We have been looking at making a Crazyradio with an nRF51-series chip, these chips have a Cortex-M0 CPU which means that they are much easier to program using a modern development environment. However none of the chip in the nRF51 series have USB which forced us to prototype the concept with an added microcontroller for USB. This creates a bigger and more populated Crazyradio:

We did not like this design very much since having 2 microcontrollers is always much more haste to program, debug and maintain. Thankfully Nordic semiconductor will release a nRF52 chip with USB support. Adding to that a powerful Cortex-M4 microcontroller, a lot of ram, still Bluetooth low energy and nRF24 radio compatibility but they also added iEEE802.15.4 2.4GHz (ie. the protocol used by Zigbee). This new chip is a very good candidate for the next Crazyradio.

We are very much in the pre-study phase for the next Crazyradio (and mass production for the new nRF52 is planned for Q4 2017 anyway…), so if there is functionality that you would like to see in a future Crazyradio it is time to speak up! Please tell us in the comment section bellow or in the forum ;-).

Crazyflie firmware and client release 2017.4 with Z-Ranger support

2017-04-24 | Arnaud | Leave a comment

We are happy to announce that we have released new versions of the Crazyflie Firmware and the Crazyflie client, both are now in version 2017.4. The main feature of the release is support for the new Z-Ranger deck.

To support the Z-Ranger, a new flight mode has been added to both the firmware and the client: the Height-hold mode. This mode allows to fly with the Z-ranger deck at a fixed height above the floor.

There are also a number of other improvements and bug fixes in the releases, mainly related to the Loco Positioning system and autonomous flight.

On the client side, this new release is also a come-back of the windows build. It means that it is now easier to get started and fly your Crazyflie directly from Windows as you can install it as a native app. We really want to build the client for Mac OS too but have met some problems. If anyone has experience in building pyqt apps for mac OS, with your help we might be able to have a mac build for the next client version ;-).

For instructions on how to upgrade see the getting started guide.

Have fun!

Z-ranger deck now availible

2017-04-18 | Tobias | Leave a comment

For those of you out there that are new to flying drones the height is often the most difficult thing to control. One solution to that problem is our newly released Z-ranger deck that can precisely measure the distance to the ground. Using this information the drone itself can stabilize on a desired target high and therefore become much easier to control. The Crazyflie 2.0 will then behave similar to a hovercraft sweeping over the ground or climbing stairs which is a ton of fun. As an in-action example please check out the video below where a Crazyfie 2.0 with a Z-ranger e.g. follows a flight of stairs :-).

For information of how to activate the height hold mode have a look at the getting started guide and for further details please check out the Z-ranger wiki page.

The Bitcraze E-shop is now official!

2017-04-10 | Björn Mauritz | Leave a comment

Seeedstudio has been our main distributor and manufacturer since we started and they have also acted as our main sales channel. A couple of years ago we started to discuss setting up our own E-shop and finally last year we decided to try our own wings. We wanted to start small and treated the E-shop as an experiment, since we are newbies at e-commerce and are learning as we are going. The E-shop has been up and running for almost 10 month now without really being official, but now we have decided to go all in!

We have definitely experienced different ups and downs this last 10 months but overall it has been a positive experience. Handling the logistics and balancing stock between different warehouses have been a challenge but in return we can now communicate with and support our customers in a better way. We have been able to release hardware early to our community through our Early access program, which has been very exciting and also given us a lot of useful feedback. We have also been able to continuously improve the overall user experience by for instance creating bundles and better information architecture.

Check our store out at https://store.bitcraze.io/ and let us know what you think! We are always trying to improve and all feedback is welcome.

Remember we still have all our great local distributors, if you prefer to buy locally please check out our distributor list.

Updated autonomous flight using OpenCV and Kalman filter

2017-04-03 | Arnaud | Leave a comment

At Bitcraze we have some history with trying to fly our Crazyflie autonomously. The most recent step is the Loco Positioning System that allows us, and you, to fly in a full room. The Loco Positioning system has boosted development of advanced algorithms for onboard position estimation and control.

Our earlier attempts where mostly based on different kinds of cameras, either a 3D camera like Kinect or regular webcams. Though, at that point, we only had the camera for position estimation and where doing the position control on the PC and not onboard the Crazyflie. This has the disadvantage to be brittle and requires a very high quality positioning from the camera: any frame where we loose the Crazyflie has a huge impact on the control behavior since the position controller relies exclusively on the camera detection.

With the Kalman filter and onboard position controller, the Crazyflie can now handle lost position information for at least a couple of seconds without big problems. This has the potential of making webcam-based position detector much more robust!

To test this theory we have grabbed the 2 years old crazyflie-ar-detector from ~~the dawer~~ github, updated it to OpenCV 3.2.0, and fed the position output to the Crazyflie 2.0 external position port. The crazyflie-ar-detector program is using ZeroMQ to communicate position and so we made a simple external position tab for the Crazyflie Client that receives position from ZeroMQ and sends it to the connected Crazyflie.

Using the new position-hold mode recently introduced in the client we can test and fly the Crazyflie under the webcam. We have taken a short video to show the performance. The result is promising and we will continue to play with ways to fly the Crazyflie autonomously.

Autonomous photo shoot

2017-03-27 | Kristoffer Richardsson | Leave a comment

Early on when we started to work on the Loco Positioning system, we came up with an idea of a Crazyflie autonomously flying into a light box, positioning it self for a few product pictures and then flying out again. The positioning system is now pretty mature and close to leave Early Access and this Friday we finally got around to do it. In this blog post we will share what we did and it also doubles as a brief howto on how to set up the system and fly a simple autonomous sequence.

We used a Crazyflie with a Loco Positioning Deck and eight Loco Positioning Anchors in our setup. Six anchors would have been fine too, but we happened to have eight in our flight lab.

When working with the Loco Positioning system the first step is always to make sure the anchors are set up correctly. We had an experimental version of the anchor firmware so we started out by pulling down the latest stock version of the source code and compiled it into a .dfu file. After that we fired up the brand new lps-tool that is used to flash firmware and configure the anchors. The anchors must be connected with a USB cable to the computer but the lps-tool reduces the flashing and configuration into a few clicks. When all anchors were updated we were ready for the next step.

The positions of the anchors are stored in the anchors them selves and the position is transmitted to the Crazyflie as a part of the ultra wide band messages used for measuring the ranges to the anchors. This way, the Crazyflie gets both anchor positions and ranges in the same process and has all the information needed to calculate its position. The second step is thus to store the positions in the anchors. In our “flight lab” we have fixed mounts for the anchors with known positions, so we could skip measuring the physical positions of the anchors.

We are working on making it possible to remotely configure the anchors to reduce the need to physically connect to them, and the position can now be set from the Crazyflie Client. We simply opened the “Loco Positioning” tab in the client, connected to a Crazyflie (with a Loco Positioning deck mounted), entered the anchor positions and hit the “Write to anchors” button. A few seconds later the anchor positions in the graphs were updated to indicate that the positions have been written to the anchors and then subsequently sent back through the ultra wide band messages to the Crazyflie.

Step three is to verify that the system is working as expected. First thing is to check that we did not mix the anchors up when configuring or placing them. In the “Loco Position” tab in the client, click the “Anchor Identification” button. In this mode anchors are lit up in the graphs when the Crazyflie gets close to them in the physical world. We went from anchor to anchor with the Crazyflie and checked that the correct anchor lit up on the screen. When confident that all was good we changed to “Position estimate” mode and verified that the estimated position matches the physical position of the Crazyflie. We have found that it can be very hard to understand, for instance that two anchors have been mixed up, by looking at the estimated position and that the “Anchor Identification” step simplifies the setup.

At this point we had a fully functioning Loco Positioning system ready for autonomous flight!

Now it was time to script a sequence. The easiest way to script a sequence is to start from the autonomousSequence.py example. Our intern Alfred took over at this point, he updated the uri to the correct settings and crafted a sequence to take off, fly into the light box, wait a while and then fly back out for a stylish landing in his hand!

Now we were ready for the actual photo shoot and Björn came down with the camera to shoot the product pictures. We hope you enjoy the results!

Porting the Crazyflie client to Qt5

2017-03-20 | Arnaud | 2 Comments

The Crazyflie client, the software running on a computer that is used to control and get telemetry from the Crazyflie, is written in Python and used PyQt4 as graphical user interface framework. This has worked quite well and has the advantage of running on windows/mac/linux without much effort. However Qt5 and PyQt5 have been released for a long while now and what should happen is starting to happen: PyQt4 is starting to get depreciated.

The first sign came from macOS, a ticket was reported on the Crazyflie client github indicating that it was not possible anymore to install PyQt4 using the Homebrew package manager. The problem was solvable since PyQt4 was still there but moved in the Homebrew ‘backyard’, so for the time being it still works but is a bit worrying. More recently Python 3.6 was release and there will apparently not be a release of PyQt4 for Python 3.6, this means that if we do not do anything the client risk to not be supported on linux anymore (the next Ubuntu LTS is planned to use Python 3.6).

This was enough to push us to port the client to the new Qt/PyQt5. The port was started by sig hmon when the first macOS related ticket was reported but we had a bad bug with the Gamepad reading on macOS, this bug was the main blocker but has been fixed last week so we are now very close to having the port functional!

If you are curious about it, we have the port in a branch on github. We are planing on merging it in the following days and releasing a new version of the client in the process.

We are also planing on releasing a Windows build and installer this time. The Windows installer has been built automatically in AppVeyor for a couple of month now and it seems stable enough to become an official version. We still want to make a macOS app out of the client but are still blocked in doing so. If you have experience making macOS app out of PyQt5-based software, we would greatly appreciate some help in getting a mac build, we have a github ticket for it.

Collaborate with us!

2017-03-13 | Björn Mauritz | Leave a comment

Lately the Crazyflie has been used more and more as a demonstration and reference platform by a number of sensor manufacturers, including Bosch Sensortec. The possibility to add expansion decks to the platform and that the project is open source makes the Crazyflie very suitable to test and demonstrate new sensors in real time. For us this is a further confirmation of the strengths of working with open source and it enables us to provide the community with new and cool expansion decks as early as possible.

We are glad that the industry sees the value in our open source project and is interested in collaborating with us. This will enable us to continue to evolve this and other exiting new hardware project in the future. If you and your company is interested in a collaboration, please read more on our “Used by the industry” section.

Crazyflie 2.0 as an autonomous flying platform

2017-03-06 | Arnaud | 1 Comment

Crazyflie has been used by hackers and researchers as an autonomous flying platform for a while, though it has required expensive or very special software and equipment. Universities and the industry have, in most cases used motion capture systems that are very precise but also comes with a hefty price tag. We have developed the Loco Positioning System as a more accessible way to achieve autonomous flight with the Crazyflie. Bitcraze has worked intensively with autonomous flight and together with the community, we have added a number of advanced algorithms to the Crazyflie firmware that not only serve the Loco Positioning System, but are useful for anyone interested in autonomous flight regardless of positioning system. The functionality is useful for anyone from researchers with motion capture systems to hackers with a couple of webcams!

Lately there has been a lot of activities around control and stabilization algorithms. The main piece of software that has been merged into the Crazyflie firmware is the Extended Kalman Filter. With it, the Crazyflie uses its inertial sensor together with positioning information in order to calculate an estimated position. One great advantage of the Kalman filter is that it can handle much lower quality or intermittent position measurements and still fly autonomously. Of course the better the position information, the better the flight performance, but things like camera tracking with occlusion becomes possible.

There has also been a lot of work on a new controller. The controller is the piece of software that looks at the position estimate and calculate control commands to reach a given set point (for example go to {x;y;z}). We are currently working on adapting the firmware architecture to merge a more advanced control algorithm that supports complex trajectory following capabilities.

Finally there is a new commander architecture that adds the possibility to send complex set points to the Crazyflie via the radio. For manual flight all you need is 3 angles, roll/pitch/yaw, and the thrust. For a more advance controller you might need position, velocity and acceleration in X/Y/Z. For even more complex trajectories, we are working at merging a sequence generator to which we can send high level setpoints like spline coordinates. The sequence generator will calculate the required setpoints onboard in real time to follow the trajectory.

All these algorithms are currently work in progress, they are in various stages of completeness, but for example we have had the Crazyflie following circles in our lab last week using the on board sequence generator, so things work. However getting the code to work is only the beginning, until it is in the master branch it does not exists. Once the code land in master, like the Kalman filter did a while ago, it will be useful out of the box for anyone that wants to work with autonomous flight using any kind of localization system: Loco Positioning, Motion Capture, GPS, webcam, etc …

Loco Positioning soon to leave early access

2017-02-27 | Kristoffer Richardsson | Leave a comment

Bitcraze is not organized as most other companies, we are self organizing, strong believers in continuous improvement and are minimizing planing to be as agile and flexible as possible. We have written a few blog posts about this earlier. One result of this philosophy is that we don’t have a long term plan or road map to share, for instance of when a particular product will be released, but never the less we will tell you a bit about what we think lies ahead of us for the Loco Positioning system.

Our goal for the coming weeks is to finalize the first version of the positioning system, that is to leave the Early Access phase. The capabilities of the first release will be to autonomously fly one Crazyflie using two way ranging. The more advanced features such as TDoA will be considered experimental and requires compile time flags to be enabled.

We feel that the performance of the system is reaching levels that we think are good enough for many use cases, what is still lacking is ease of use. To fix that we are focusing on simplifying installation and configuration of the system by adding a few new tools.

We have found that one problem area is to install the system and get the anchor positions right. If the positions are not correct the estimated position of the Crazyflie will of course be wrong and it can be hard to understand what the cause of the problem is. To solve this we have added a new tab in the PC client (the LPS tab) that allows the user to see and configure the anchor positions as well as see the estimated position of the Crazyflie. There is also a mode in the client that is used to identify anchors by moving the Crazyflie around in the room, when close to an anchor that anchor lights up in the client to verify the setup.

Loco Positioning Tab

The anchor positions have up till now been stored in the Crazyflie or the client (ROS or python script), which is not optimal as data in the firmware or client becomes tightly coupled to the physical layout of the positioning system. If we move an anchor we either have to rebuild the Crazyflie firmware or have to transfer position data from the client to the Crazyflie before we can estimate the position. The solution is to move the anchor position into the anchor it self and send it as a part of the ultra wide band communication to the Crazyflie when ranging.

In the current Loco Positioning Node firmware, configuration changes and firmware updates are a bit cumbersome as it requires a few different external software packages. Further more different tools are needed depending on the OS of the host. To simplify this process we are working on a LPS-tool that will enable the user to configure and update the nodes using a GUI with clear feedback on the progress. The tool is written in python and the intention is that it will work on all our supported platforms.

We hope these improvements will lead to a positioning system that is easy to use and will enable all you people out there to do awesome stuff! As always, feedback is welcome.