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.

A we wrote before, we are working on a Ultra-Wide-Band-based local positioning system for the Crazyflie. We are doing slow progress but progress anyway and we wanted to do a small update on it.

We are at our second revision on the anchors, they are now based on an STM32F072 CPU which has the advantage to have an USB bootloader which will useful to update them on the field. We are trying to think about either or not we should implement more communication like Ethernet to the anchor. Our main use-case is to get the localisation in the Crazyflie but we are aware of use-case where the localisation is required on the ground instead. If you have any input on the design of Ultra-Wide-Band anchors please let us know.

We have also made a 3D printed support for attaching the anchors to the ceiling or ground:

As for the localisation, we are able to range from the copter to the anchors and we are logging the range using the Crazyflie 2.0 log subsystem. We have tested logging data in a csv file and running a Particle filter to find the copter position, more about the filter in a future post.  So far it looks good but we need a nicer way to visualize the data. The way we are taking is to learn and use ROS.

ROS is a system used by researcher in robotics and it implements a lot of things like visualization and state of the art algorithm. Wolfgang from USC has written a ROS driver for Crazyflie and it is about time we are getting into ROS. It is a learning process for us but the plan is to implement and test the UWB local positioning system on top of ROS, which will allow us to use its components and reduce development time.

The last week has been really busy here at Bitcraze. We are working on regular bugfixes, support and new Decks to be release as soon as possible. But at the same time, we have moved our office in a new building (still in Malmö, Sweden) which is a lot of work, even more for us who have a lot of random hardware lying around. We left Minc, the incubator that hosted us since our beginning as full-time company. We where really happy at Minc, it has been a great place to work and evolve. We thought it was time to move to get closer to other hardware companies and to have a bit more space.

We are now at The Ground. It is a co-working space for startups that hosts some very cool companies. We are really happy to have moved there and are just started to settle-in. We now have a lab separated from the office (which is a first for Bitcraze, we are a bit anxious to be so far from the soldering iron but lets see how it works :-). The great news is that we are going to use the basement as an autonomous-flight-lab to develop the DWM-1000-based local positioning system. I am sure we will have more news on that in later posts.

[Show as slideshow]

Another important change: we now have a new member in our team! Björn, who arrived last week, will look, among other things, on refreshing the website and all our communication. The current website state is fully made by hardware engineer and we thought it should be shaped-up a bit.

Björn

Seeedstudio is our manufacturer and our main distributor. Last week Mandy from Seeedstudio came and visited us after being at Maker faire Rome. She did a very interesting talk at Minc, our incubator, about manufacturing in China and how Seeedstudio helps with agile manufacturing. The interest was high here in Malmo, it is not often someone from China comes to Sweden and talks about manufacturing. Usually you would have to travel to China to find out more about that.

If you would like to know more about what she talked about the slides are available on Slideshare:

Mandy from @seeedstudio at @mincmalmo. About agile hardware production pic.twitter.com/8dY5SwxE3K

— Bitcraze (@Bitcraze_se) October 22, 2015

Marcus and Arnaud have packed up and left the Berlin Maker Faire after two hectic days. and last weekend Tobias and I were at Maker Fair New York. It’s a lot of fun showing the Crazyflie, meeting people and getting feedback from the community!

This time we had created a demo where we used a webcam to track the position of the Crazyflie (see older blog post). I really like the demo, it’s pretty minimalistic and shows the awesome capabilities of the Crazyflie as a platform that enables the user to explore and develop on top of it. Just add a webcam, AR-tag some control algorithms, imagination and engineering and you have an autonomously flying Crazyflie!

When Tobias and I arrived at the New York Maker Faire on Friday afternoon to set up the demo, we discovered that our booth was not indoors, but under a roof without walls. And it was windy!

There was no way the control algorithms could manage to keep the Crazyflie at its taget position, so what to do? We tried various ways of tethering it with a string while still flying, but without any success. We had to resort to hanging the copter in a string, but not really flying it. To at least get some use of the positioning system, we used the position of the hanging copter to change the color and intensity of LED-rings on four other copters that we put in the corners of the test rig. Not what we hoped for but what do you do?

My favourite gadget at the New York fare was the Pancake Bot – a must in every home!

The Berlin Maker Faire was organized for the first time last weekend. The venue was a bit smaller than other Maker Faires we’ve been to, but there was lots of interesting visitors and it was held in a very nice old railway-postal building. Fred from our community joined us during the fair and gave us some much needed support in the booth. As for the demo it was working better, but we still had some issues with lighting and the detection of the AR-tag. Room for improvement.

The fair had a drone area, but unfortunately not a lot of drones. We were flying the Crazyflie 2.0 as well as a bigger quad using the Big Quad deck. Aside from that Fred brought a long his even bigger quad that uses the Open Pilot CC 3D.

Big thanks to Fred for showing us Berlin and helping us out!