We are right now eagerly awaiting the first batch of the Loco positioning system to be done and ready for shipping. The interest for the early access release has been very encouraging and we are super happy about the attention we have received from all around the world.
We have made a new video about how to get started with the Loco positioning system that we hope you will enjoy. The video is showing the process from receiving the Loco Positioning system up to having an autonomous flying Crazyflie. The written information can be found on the wiki.
While it is a central part of a quadcopter the core of the Crazyflie 2.0 had not moved since we released it. We deemed it to be good enough, it was flying and going fast after all.
Recently TheSeanKelly from the community did not hear it that way and started investigating the flight performance starting by the attitude control PID. The results so far are impressive!
Sean tuned the rate loop a lot, this is the loop responsible to control the angular rate of the Crazyflie in roll and pitch. Doing that and the attitude loop could be tweaked which we did a bit, the one responsible to control the absolute orientation of the copter. And the results is that two major issues with the flight performance seems to be greatly improved:
The take-off behavior: Crazyflie is currently not taking-off straight by itself. With the new settings this is fixed and at any thrust Crazyflie just goes straight up.
Attitude control: We had a lot of overshot in the attitude control. Basically it means that if you go forward 10 degrees and request 0 degree (level) the Crazyflie will overshoot with a negative angle causing it to stop. With the new tighter control if you ask +10degrees pitch the crazyflie accelerates and if you ask 0 it just stop accelerating. It will then continue at nearly constant speed. This is the “correct” behavior. This also means that the Crazyflie now reacts much more precisely and quickly to joystick controls.
We have tried to make a short video to show the new performance. Though the attitude control is really hard to show. We installed a test pilot on our Crazyflie that shows how much the new parameters helps in overall stability (I have tried to steer with old parameters as hard as I was steering with the new one). We also show more stability in pretty windy condition.
These new parameter have been pushed protected by an experimental flag. After more testing the official firmware will have much better flight performance out of the box :-).
As we already talked before in a couple of post, we are currently developping a local positioning system for the Crazyflie based on ultra-wide-band radio DWM1000. This is one of our main focus currently so we wanted to post a short update on our progress.
We have assembled and shipped a couple of LPS system already and so far the performance and progress are great. We now think that we have the copter flying as good as we can have it without running sensor fusion and the control loop in the Crazyflie microcontroller. Next step is to integrate algorithms in the Crazyflie.
We are currently working hard at finishing the design to make it ready for production. We will write more updates about that so stay tuned :).
We have shot a short video demonstrating the current state, see after the video for more information about the setup:
To make this video we have installed 6 anchors. 3 are above the room and 3 at about 50cm from the ground. The Crazyflie has a LPS deck and ranges in a round-robing fashion with all 6 anchors. The ROS driver pulls the ranging, estimate the Crazyflie position, and calculate a corrected roll/pitch/thrust in order to keep it at the pre-defined setpoint. The Yaw is not controlled externally, it is kept by the Crazyflie internal gyroscope only.
The ROS computer was setup according to the instruction on our wiki, and by launching the pf_hover launch file:
This very impressing work centers around the ability for a drone to actually land on vertical surfaces. In addition to this the robot climb along that surface. Read more here and here. Really cool!
One of the future usages the researchers mention is to help out in the rescue work after earthquakes and other catastrophes. We are so proud that our drone is used in this research field!
If you haven’t watched it already, make sure to watch the TED talk “Raffaello D’Andrea: Meet the dazzling flying machines of the future”!
We are super excited to see that they use the Crazyflie 2.0 drones for the firefly swarm demo in the end of the talk. After all, our goal is to enable people to test their ideas, so this awesome demo makes us thrilled!
While digging around in our office looking for a board we found a piezo buzzer we bought a while back. The reason for buying it was to test some buzzer functionality to the Crazyflie 2.0, but we forgot about it. But now that we found it again we got to work :-) We documented the build in our hacks section on the wiki, but here’s a quick run down.
Here’s a Vine with the result (enabling sound is a good idea :-) )
On a side note Seeedstudio will start shipping out the CCW propeller replacements this week. If you still haven’t filled in the replacement form it’s not too late, here’s the form.
We are really happy to announce that we are starting the pre-order for the Crazyflie 2.0 today! After spending nearly 10 months doing development, we have reached a point where we are very happy with the design and the performance. Now all we have to do is to kick off the production and that’s where the pre-order comes in.
During the next three weeks we will be taking pre-orders for the Crazyflie 2.0 and related products. After the three weeks has passed we will start the production and the current estimate for shipping the products is the second week of December. As a reward to users that want to help us out by pre-ordering our products, we are lowering the prices with about 15% until the 16th of October when the pre-order ends.
So, just to clarify:
Pre-order end: 16th of October
Estimated shipping: Second week of December
If you want to know more about the Crazyflie 2.0 and what it’s about, then have a look at the Crazyflie 2.0 product page. It explains a bit about the communication (Bluetooth LE and Crazyradio), the expansion boards and gives you an idea what you could use the platform for. The Crazyflie 2.0 developed with developers in mind, so it features thins like wireless firmware upgrade, real-time parameter setting/getting and data logging using graphs. To make it easier for developers to get going we provide a pre-installed virtual machine that contains most of our tool-chains for building firmware and software, as well as KiCad for the hardware design.
For the Crazyflie 2.0 pre-order we aren’t just making the Crazyflie 2.0 available, we are launching a full set of products to support it. Here’s the list of the main products and the expansion boards that are included in the pre-order:
Crazyflie 2.0: The next generation of our flying open development platform with lots of new features
Crazyradio PA: The same mechanical footprint and price as the current Crazyradio, but now with a power amplifier that we have tested to above 1km range (line-of-sight) with the Crazyflie 2.0
Debug adapter kit: An easy way to debug the nRF51 and STM32F4 on the Crazyflie 2.0 by using an adapter board for connecting a standard 20-pin/100mil JTAG or 10-pin/50mil Cortex-debug cable
LED-ring expansion board: Fly into the night in style with this expansion board featuring 12 bright RGB LEDs that can be individually controlled and two strong white front-facing LEDs
Qi expansion board: Charge your Crazyflie 2.0 without any wires with this inductive charging expansion board using Qi
Breakout expansion board: Easy solderless prototyping with a board designed to fit a breadboard to try out your designs on the ground
Prototype expansion board: With space for prototyping and access to all the pins in the Crazyflie 2.0 expansion port there’s lots of possibilities with this board
We are also including all the spare parts in the pre-order to make sure that everyone gets a chance to get what they need together with their Crazyflie 2.0. Here’s the list of parts:
For the release we wanted to make a video explaining a bit the new platform, but since we have been really short on time we’re not done yet. Instead we are publishing a short video showing the Crazyflie 2.0 in action together with the LED-ring expansion board. The video also features the traffic light hack we did a few weeks ago.
Have a look at the Getting Started page for the Crazyflie 2.0 for assembly instructions or the wiki documentation for the project to see how to assemble the new solderless Crazyflie. There’s also some Expansion port documentation available as well as User Guide. We are still working on filling out more of the documentation, so bare with us. With the hardware completed we are now refocusing on the firmware and software. We have built in lots of neat features into the new Crazyflie 2.0 hardware that we now need to add software support for. So over the coming months we will be working on the iOS/Android apps and the Crazyflie PC client as well as the firmware. We will of course keep everyone updated of the progress here on our blog. Once the Crazyflie 2.0 products start shipping we will publish all the code and hardware design on our GitHub.
Starting with the pre-order of the Crazyflie 2.0 we are also lowering the price for the current version of the Crazyflie. The Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter 10-kit is lowered from $149 to $116 and the bundle with the Crazyradio is lowered from $179 to $146. So if you can’t wait until December then have a look at the current version over at Seeedstudio.
Finally it’s getting really close and we are very excited to say that the pre-order of the Crazyflie 2.0 will start this week! We will post more details about it during the week, until then here’s a short teaser from our release video :-)
With the help of our new intern Mattias we finally got around to shooting a short video and taking photos of the Crazyflie 2.0 prototypes. We are really excited to finally show the new version and we are looking forward to getting some feedback from our readers. We are currently finalizing the design of the motor mounts, so for the video and photos we are using 3D printed prototypes printed in our Ultimaker. The design used in the photos is pretty close to the final design, which will also be transparent. The Crazyflies shown doesn’t have any expansion boards attached, instead there’s just a PCB that holds the battery.
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 :-)
