Last week at Devoxx UK

2014-06-16 | Marcus | Leave a comment

Like we mentioned a couple of weeks ago we went to Devoxx UK last week exhibiting the Crazyflie. We got a chance to do lots of fun things, like flying the FPV quad in the keynote and also over the exhibition floor. The image is a bit faded, but we had the luck of having a projector next to us that we hooked up the FPV receiver to so the video feed was projected on the wall behind our booth. Our booth was next to the NFC ring exhibition which had a nerf gun that was unlocked when wearing their NFC ring. We quickly came to the conclusion that trying to shoot the Crazyflie down with the nerf-gun was the way to go :-) It can actually take a couple of direct hits before going down!

On Thursday night we jointed the IoT hackathon hosted by IBM. We got an Arduino with lots of sensors that we were supposed to interface from Java. Unfortunately we didn’t do too well on the Java front, but we managed better with the Arduino. We decided to use on the thumb-joysticks for controlling roll/pitch and a light sensor for controlling the thrust. Our first plan was to use a microphone for controlling the trust with the sound-level, but we realized that might be a bit too tight with time. The joystick and light values are sent via the UART to the PC and picked up in the Crazyflie Python Client using a modified version of the joystick drivers. Instead of reading events from PyGame we read data from the serial port. This makes it alot easier to debug since we get feedback from the input-device directly in the UI. In the end we got it working (kind of..) so we could fly and actually won the hackaton! So now we have a box of sensors that we can play around with. Below is an image of the sensors connected to the Arduino.

Welcome Miguel!

2014-06-09 | Tobias | Leave a comment

We are glad to announce that we got a reinforcement to our team. His name is Miguel Piteira Gomes and just got out of school where he studied mechanics. Now we can finally do other stuff then electronics and software! Miguel comes from Portugal and will help us out during the summer. We wish him a big welcome!

Some crowdfunding campaigns

2014-06-02 | Marcus | Leave a comment

We are always looking for fun things to hack together using the Crazyflie. The last couple of weeks we contributed to two exciting open hardware campaigns on Indiegogo that we are hoping to get our hands on soon.

The VoCore

First up is the VoCore, a coin-sized SoC breakout with WiFi running Linux. Based on the RT5350, it could be used for WiFi control (with AP support) or to add extra power for doing calculations.

The second one is the 3Dpad, an open source gesture controller. We have been using the Leap Motion for flying before, and we are really eager to try the concept but with an open source project. Even tough the 3Dpad doesn’t support the same hand/finger tracking as the Leap Motion, we are hoping that we can hack together a usable controller for the Crazyflie. It uses capacitive technology that makes it possible to place it behind materials that are not transparent. Imagine placing it under the desk and flying with your hand above the desk!

Best of luck to the projects with financing and development!

Flying robots and Devoxx presentation

2014-05-26 | Marcus | Leave a comment

This week we were planning on recording some FPV videos around the office with a new transmitter that gives us better range. But after battling with our USB capture device for a while we finally gave up. We will have to try to find a better one (that hopefully works in Linux!). But until then here’s two videos. First one from BBC is about the exciting future for flying robots (thanks to phenoptix for tipping us off to this one) and the second one is the recording from our presentation at Devoxx France a couple of months ago. The presentation is in French and you can pretty quickly guess who is the native French speaker and who is not :-)

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Devoxx UK

2014-05-19 | Marcus | Leave a comment

Last year we presented the Crazyflie at Devoxx Belgium and last month we got a chance to do it again at Devoxx France (but in french). To complete our Devoxx tour we also accepted an invitation to Devoxx UK. But this time we won’t be presenting, we will only be flying :-). Normally when we speak conferences we hang out at the conference before and after the presentation. It’s a really great way to meet other geeks, discuss and have a lot of fun. So this time around we will only be hanging out in the exhibition hall. If you are going make sure to come by our table and do some flying!

Things happening in the community

2014-05-12 | Marcus | Leave a comment

It’s been a while since we summed up things happening in the community so here’s some of the things that are happening. There’s lots of more things, so if you think we are missing something, then post it in the comments below.

Ralph has been doing some work on an semi-automatic flip feature in the client. There’s more info on the forum and video below.

Last week we tested some modifications made by otto for a headfree mode (i.e yaw only rotates the platform, not the referance direction). It’s a really nice feeling just rotating without taking care of the direction you are going in :-) There’s more information and links to code on the forum.

The SHERPA project have been working on swarm algorithms using a vision system and the Crazyflie.

Geof from Centeye have been working on optical flow stabilization using the Crazyflie. He has a prototype board working and there’s lots of information in the forum about this build. To see the results have a look at the video below.

Thanks to Victor the Deviation firmware for Devo-7e (custom firmware for Devo RC-controllers) now has support for the Crazyflie (needs hardware hack). If you would like to give it a try have a look at the code or grab one of the nightlies.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have been testing a new concept for a HoverBall using the Crazyflie. Imagine throwing a ball into the air that doesn’t come down (well not right away at least..). Here’s some more info and a picture.

We have also seen some nice stand alone controllers for the Crazyflie, one by MidLifeCrisis (more info here) and one by ivandevel (video below) . There’s also more info in the forum.

There also some updates on the work done by Oliver on the Kinect tracking of the Crazyflie. A demo video is shown below (it looks great!) and there’s more information on the forum.

And finally here’s a nice video we found on Youtube showing position control of the Crazyflie using a VICON system.

Off to speak at Devoxx in Paris

2014-04-14 | Marcus | Leave a comment

This week we are heading off to Paris in France to present our project at Devoxx France. So if you are there and want to listen, then drop by the Ella Fitzgerald room at 10:40. The presentation will be in french and it will of course end with some demos :-) We will also hang around after the presentation just in case someone wants to test their flying skills. We are currently working on some nice light-effects using the Adafruit Neo Pixel ring that we will show off.

Also the Crazyflie is finally back in stock at Seeedstudio!

Joining the business incubator Minc

2014-03-17 | Marcus | Leave a comment

A couple of weeks ago we moved into the Malmö based business incubator Minc. It’s a great chance to get some extra help developing Bitcraze and also to get a chance to meet people from other start-ups. Below is a picture of a bunch of Crazyflies in our lab (i.e the table designated lab).

On a more technical note, here’s a video of a blimp that was hacked together with some left over party-balloons and a broken Crazyflie that we had lying around. It’s the day after the party, so there wasn’t that much lift left in the balloons (that’s why we have a bunch of them). After a few hacks to the firmware it actually works pretty well! The motors power has been redistributed and only the Yaw regulation is active, which explains that the yaw is still pretty stable, we are thinking about pushing the ‘blimp-mode’ at some point (first we will need more balloons and Helium though :) ).

Visit to Embedded World and TUM university München.

2014-03-03 | Tobias | 4 Comments

Last week was a hectic but exiting week for me. First I visited Embedded World in Nürnberg and then made a visit to TUM university in München.

I was actually visiting Embedded World because ST Microelectronics contacted us and wondered if we could do a Crazyflie version with the more powerful STM32F3 and use ST MEMS sensors. So during the winter we did some prototypes where we fitted the pin compatible STM32F303CB and a LSM9DS0 9-axis MEMS module. Porting the code was pretty straight forward and took about a week. It was manly the drivers that needed porting but getting the FPU running also took some time. Our quick bench-marking test showed an ~35% increase of the floating point intense code and by using further speed boosters like the core coupled memory (CCM) it could probably be increased a lot more. Right now these extra CPU cycles aren’t really needed but for the future when more complex sensor fusion algorithms might be used they will be valuable. Therefore the STM32F3 series it very interesting as it packs plenty of processing power in a small package.

Having the ST-prototype on display in the ST booth at embedded world was quite a strange feeling. Something that started out as a fun thing to do on our free time is now sitting on a wall at big cenvenstion as EW, kind of hard to grasp. Unfortunately we where not allowed to fly around and play with it due to restrictions but I had a great time there anyway. I also participated in a short interview which ST arranged, really strange seeing yourself like that. I should probably focus on my engineering career instead… :-)

After the EW I went to visit the Techische Universität München TUM, as one of our most active users Oliver is studying there. Oliver made an awesome HUD and also contributed with most of the altitude hold code, and since München only is an hour away by train it was a great opportunity to go visit him. Oliver arranged so that Jacob from the computer vision group invited me to their department where they demonstrated some of their work, especially their work done with computer vision and quadcopters. Amazing stuff! I really hope we can do something together in the future and make this technology widespread.

[Show as slideshow]

Ongoing migration to GitHub

2014-02-10 | Marcus | Leave a comment

We have started the migration to GitHub, as usual with this kind of things it is not as obvious as we had thought at first. We decided to start with the most active repos which is currently the PC client. In the process it will be renamed crazyflie-clients-python to show that it contains the python libs and it works on more than just PC (ie. raspbery pie at least).

The source code migration is a little challenge due to the very different way Git and Mercurial handle branches. Using git-remote-hg we could pull the mercurial repos in a newly created git repos and then push the interesting branches and tags to github. This seems to work quite well but the last things we would like to have is the possibility to pull changes made in git to mercurial so that we could keep the current mercurial as a read-only mirror. Internally some of us plan to still work with mercurial anyway using hg-git and the great TortoiseHG.

For migrating the issues from BitBucket to GitHub we forked this script to add some functionality. Aside from copying the title/text/comments, we also wanted to map the metadata from BitBucket to labels/milestones on GitHub. So the modified script first creates/sets the correct milestone on GitHub and then creates/sets the labels according to a JSON mapping of BitBucket metadata to GitHub labels. It supports mapping of kind, status, priority and component to zero or more labels. The modified script is available here. While doing tests we discovered that github was sending a mail for every single ticket and comment, a collateral damage was one of our mailbox that got 303 messages in a couple of minutes (the smartphone attached to the mailbox actually played notification tunes for hours…).