cfclient 2015.08 released

2015-08-24 | Marcus | Leave a comment

A new version of the Crazyflie PC Python client has been released, version 2015.08. It’s been a while since the last release of the client so there’s a long list of changes, including lots of fixed bugs. The main new features are:

Student/Teacher mode: It’s possible to use two input devices, where one can take over control from the other. This can be used for teaching or for working with a computer auto-pilot (doc)
Control the LED-ring from the Flight Tab: Now it’s possible to turn on/off the headlights directly with a click and to select the LED-ring effect from a drop-down (doc)
New LED-tab to set custom patterns and intensity: Enables the user to individually set the color of each LED as well as the intensity of the LED-ring
ZMQ access to LED-ring memory and parameters: Write patterns for the LED-ring or set/get parameter values from an external application using JSON and ZMQ (doc)
ZMQ input device: Simulate a joystick by sending axis values in JSON via ZMQ. This can be used to implement a computer auto-pilot using for instance the Kinect (doc)
Switched from PyGame to PySDL2 on Mac OSX/Windows and native input device on Linux
WiiMote support

The next step after the release is to shape up the code a bit, so we’ve started using Travis for building and continuous integration. The long term goal is to run Flake8 and unit-tests on the code, but we still have a bit to go. The way we’re working towards this is by slowly enabling more and more checking in Travis, fixing one type of errors at a time.

Firmware and dwm1000 nodes

2015-08-17 | Arnaud | 9 Comments

DWM1000 nodes
Last hacking-Friday we have had some time to put together the DWM1000 boards we ordered during the summer. The DWM1000 from Decawave is an ultra-wide-band ieee802.15.4 radio transceiver that can very precisely timestamp packets arrival and departure. More simply it means that it is a standard and it can be used to implement a real time local positioning system: this could be really handy for the Crazyflie. We soldered all the boards and we got some basic ranging working on the nodes. The next step is to implement an opensource driver to be able to implement the ranging in the Crazyflie. We will keep you updated on the progress but in the mean time here is a photo of the prototypes:

Things happening on the firmware side
Recently the commit rate for the Crazyflie 1.0/2.0 firmware has increased a lot. Some of it because of pull requests, great work, and some because we are starting to move in hacks and such on feature branches into the master branch. Our new college Kristoffer has taught us that having stuff on feature branches can be a bad idea, they tend to stay there. It is then better to have them compile switched and in the master branch as it is more visible and get a better chance of getting in for real.

Here are some of the recent thing going on:

A situation awareness framework originating from this pull request by fredgrat. It allows the Crazyflie 1.0/2.0 to react to triggers. Currently there is a free-fall, tumbled and at-rest detection. He recently also submitted an auto-takeoff functionality. Enable the functionality with the define here.
The beginning of a Arduino like API for the deck port. Currently GPIO and ADC are the only functions there but more will come.
Possibility to fly in rate (acrobatic) mode committed here. Support in the cfclient for this is being developed so currently one have to change the parameters to activate it manually.
Carefree, plus and X-mode implemented in firmware. There is also support for this being added to the cfclient.
Automatically switch to brushless driver. Motor driver being rewritten so it can be dynamically configured. This means that if the Crazylfie 2.0 is attached to the big-quad-deck it can automatically switch over to the brushless driver during power on.

Summertime are good times, less administration and more time to develop! As soon as things has been integrated and fully tested we will do a new release of the firmware and the cfclient :).

Back from vacation

2015-08-10 | Tobias | Leave a comment

Starting this week we’re all back at our desks and after getting some time off, recharging our batteries, we’re slowly getting up to speed again. The summer has been spent on everything from improving our server environment to cleaning up both the firmware and the client. We’ve also been working on some new things, like the iOS bootloader and prototyping new decks for the Crazyflie 2.0.

Now it’s full speed ahead into an exiting fall with lots of things happening!

As a side note we are going to Maker Faire Berlin the 3&4th of October and we are planing to do a Bitcraze meet-up in Berlin while we are there. We started a thread in the forum to talk about it.

Big Quad Deck
Today we received the revised big-quad-deck PCBs. We made the connectors fit a bit better, and fixed the deck port connectors being mirrored, and it is starting to look quite good. Next up is to implement the firmware functionality, which is the biggest work. If you have any ideas or suggestions on the design please let us know!