With 2025 coming to a close and only a few days left on the calendar, it’s time to turn our attention forward and take a look at what we have planned for 2026. As usual, the year ahead is shaping up to be a busy one, with several long-running projects finally moving closer to release.

Projects

Our first major release of the year will be the Color LED deck, currently planned for the end of January. You can sign up here to receive an email when it’s available! This has been a long-awaited addition, and getting it out the door will allow us to fully shift focus to two larger projects that have been steadily progressing throughout 2025: Lighthouse v2 and the camera deck.

The upcoming Lighthouse v2 deck is designed to support Lighthouse systems with up to 16 base stations, significantly increasing the size of the spaces that can be covered. We made solid progress on this during 2025, both in hardware and software, and 2026 will be about pushing this work further toward a more complete and robust solution.

The camera deck is another project that has been quietly advancing behind the scenes. Several prototypes have already flown successfully, and with more dedicated time now available, we’re aiming to make meaningful progress on this front during 2026 as well. While there’s still work to be done, things are moving in the right direction.

Beyond these headline projects, we also expect to continue improving the Crazyradio 2, building on the updates from 2025 and further strengthening its performance, especially for swarm use cases.

Conferences

As is now tradition, the year will kick off with FOSDEM, where we’ll once again be present — more details on that coming soon. In late March, you’ll also find us at ERF, followed by ICRA in Vienna in early June. Conferences are always a great opportunity to meet the community, see what others are working on, and share what we’ve been building.

We’ll be sharing more information about these events — and possibly a few others — as the year unfolds, so keep an eye on the blog for updates.

Team

After a big growth spurt in 2025, the team is in a good place, but we’re not quite done yet. We still have one open position for a production QA & Embedded Engineer, and we’re looking forward to welcoming the right person to join us.

2026 is shaping up to be an exciting year, and we’re looking forward to sharing more as things develop. With that, we’d like to wish all our users, contributors, and readers a great start to 2026. We hope it will be a year full of successful experiments, smooth flights, and maybe even a few unexpected discoveries. See you in the new year!

Bitcraze is on an exciting journey on many levels and one of them is expanding the team. In the middle of September, I started at Bitcraze. My name is Hampus, I am 33 years old and I will have a role as administrator. I live in central Malmö together with my wife Hannah and my 4 year old kid, Sigge.

After a few weeks at Bitcraze I am 100% confident I made the right choice. The company might be small, but it’s full of fun and interesting people. Everyone is helpful and share an awesome enthusiasm for the company.

My role as administrator will include many tasks. But to summarize, I will “steal” responsibilities from my colleagues, for example bookkeeping and other financial tasks, so that they can focus more on the development of the Bitcraze products.

I really enjoy administration and diving into Excel-sheets. This is not always the case for colleagues, so hopefully this means that it will be a good match between me and the rest of the company.

Besides Bitcraze, I am playing professional handball in HK Malmö at the top the Swedish division. My ambition is that my my experiences from many years of playing a team sport will help in the development of Bitcraze. I will split my time between Bitcraze and HK Malmö 50/50.

Have you ever wondered what could happen if open robotics were truly accessible to everyone — researchers, educators, and innovators alike? That’s the vision that drew me to Bitcraze, and why I’m thrilled to share that I’ve joined the team as Strategic Growth Director.

Bitcraze isn’t just a technology company — it’s a community of curious, collaborative people who believe in making robotics both powerful and playful. From my very first conversation with the team, I felt the energy and integrity that set this place apart.

Over the past decade, I’ve had the privilege of working with organizations big and small, translating complex tech into real-world impact. What excites me most is helping people like you turn bold ideas into reality — whether you’re pushing the boundaries of research, inspiring students in the classroom, or building new industrial solutions.

At Bitcraze, I’ll focus on finding new ways for us to grow, building partnerships that matter, and making sure our story resonates with the people who can benefit most. But more than anything, I want to listen and learn from this amazing community.

If you’re curious about what we’re building, have thoughts on the future of robotics, or just want to swap ideas, I’d love to connect. Let’s shape what’s next together!

Hello there! I am Aris, a recent graduate from the Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics Department at the University of Patras, Greece.

For the last couple of years, as a member of the Robotics Group at the University of Patras, I have been working with Bitcraze products, including the Crazyflie 2.1 and the Lighthouse Positioning System, exploring swarming scenarios. In my diploma thesis I investigated the autonomous transportation of an object by a swarm of two rope-tethered quadcopters, where the introduced path planning algorithm enables the swarm to approach, grasp, lift and transport the load.

I’m excited to join Bitcraze as part of the team, where I can further develop my skills and gain valuable work experience. My principal objective is to improve the Lighthouse Positioning System and contribute to the development of a new solution for tracking in larger volumes. During this time, I look forward to deepen my knowledge on Bitcraze’s products and learn how they apply in real-world applications.

November is always a tough month in Sweden, when the darkness deepens and the cold begins to bite. We had our first snow last week, a sudden reminder that winter has arrived. So instead of letting the gloom settle in, we decided to turn to what makes us feel good: pretty lights, pretty trees, and pepparkakor!

I realized that, although we talked about it last year, we never fully showed our big new flight arena once it was up and running. It made an appearance in our latest Christmas video, but was actually never fully revealed before. Capturing a 110square meters space in a single photo is no small feat, but here is my best shot:

It felt the right time to make the office feel a little more wintery. It may be a little early, but we couldn’t resist the charm of festive decorations and a cozy atmosphere to brighten up the dark days. Especially now that we’re more settled into our massive flight arena – a space this large calls for many more Christmas lights! Of course, there’s more to it than just creating a Netflix-Christmas-movie vibe—we’re also gearing up for two big events: our annual Christmas party, which will be hosted here, and the filming of our newest Christmas video!

Speaking of Christmas video, that’s exactly what we’ll be diving into during our next dev meeting! We recently had a great time revisiting how we’ve used demos to guide development – if you missed that particular dev meeting, you can see it here. We thought it would be a great idea to dedicate our next session to exploring all the Christmas videos we’ve created over the years. It’s fascinating to see how our Christmas projects have evolved over time and we hope you’ll join us to reminisce about it Wednesday 11th of December at 15.00 (CET). You’ll find all the info here.