If you’ve ever gone looking for a more advanced, or use-case-specific Crazyflie example (something beyond the basic single-feature ones), you’ve probably ended up digging through the cflib and crazyflie-firmware example folders. That’s about to change.
We’ve created a new repository: crazyflie-demos. It’s a dedicated place where both us at Bitcraze and the broader community can host self-contained, well-described Crazyflie demos.
Why a new repository?
The examples in the core Bitcraze repositories were meant to be kept focused: demonstrating one feature, one API, or one subsystem at a time. But real demos tend to grow beyond that pretty quickly. Once you start combining positioning systems, swarming, custom firmware apps, external sensors, or other integrations, things stop fitting naturally into the firmware or library repos.
crazyflie-demos gives those larger, more practical examples a proper home, and finally provides a good answer to the question: “where should I put this cool thing I built?”
Why not just a folder of examples?
We want to avoid the fate of some older example collections that gradually turned into an unmaintained pile of half-working demos and missing context.
The goal with crazyflie-demos is that every demo should be properly documented and actually runnable. That means clear descriptions, listed dependencies, and enough context to understand what’s going on without digging through source code for an hour.
Another important part is reproducibility: each demo is self-contained and uses pinned dependencies, so an example you clone two years from now should still work.
What’s in there already?
The repository is organized by demo type:
scripts/cflib: Host-side Python scripts using crazyflie-lib-python, covering the full Crazyflie API.
scripts/rust: Rust demos using crazyflie-lib-rs, showcasing its high-performance and native async support.
scripts/cflib2: Early demos for our new Python library, crazyflie-lib-python-v2, built on top of the Rust library. cflib2 doesn’t have a release yet, but we’re already writing demos for it to test the API and the performance.
firmware: Out-of-tree firmware apps that are flashed directly to the Crazyflie. Each demo carries its own crazyflie-firmware submodule so you’re always building against the right version.
hybrid: Demos that combine onboard firmware with a host-side script working together.
A place to share your work
A big motivation behind crazyflie-demos is making it easier to share work with the community.
If you’ve built something useful, or just a fun experiment using our products, this is the place for it. Not everything needs to live in its own repository or branch. A well-described demo here makes it easier for others to find, understand, and build on your work, and most importantly, to get inspired by it.
We’ll also be using this repository as the go-to reference whenever people ask for more use-case-specific examples, so good demos here will naturally help more people discover what’s possible with the Crazyflie ecosystem.
We have already announced it a bit on social media, but in this blogpost we are announcing it officially: we are moving our support to Github Discussions which can be reached by going to discussions.bitcraze.io. We will deprecate our old forum and lock it for new thread creation and user registration starting from week of the 6th of June.
Don’t worry! We don’t have any plans of removing the actual content of the old forum as this is much too valuable for support. But for most communication, support and discussions, we will only be using Github Discussions.
The Reasoning
Technically, there is nothing really wrong with the old forum! Bitcraze has used this phpBB-based platform ever since 2013 and has helped tremendously in support in all those years until now. For a long while, it also has been an active sharing medium next to support, where users could share their cool Crazyflie projects. So it was more than a support channel… it was a community watering-hole! Unfortunately, the backbone of the forum has not progressed in functionality, the categories style defeated it’s purpose and we found we had to constantly switch back and forth between the forum and Github issue list on a daily basis. So we have decided it is time for something else.
Moreover, the last few years we have noticed that the sharing of cool projects became significantly less, no more discussions were initiated and the forum was mostly used for only support and questions. As we missed seeing cool projects and discussing the Crazyflie (also due to Corona), we tried to open up a Bitcraze Discord channel (see this blogpost) to initiate more discussions and sharing as a supplement to the forum. Unfortunately, it did not really take off in terms of activity, and the content is not searchable without a discord account. After a unfortunate hack-attack last year we removed the invite link from our website.
We did get feedback that having 2 platforms separated for support and community was confusing to the users, as they didn’t know where to ask a question anymore. The ideal situation would then to be choose another platform where we can have all on there. Discourse we had our eyes on for a while, which has been used by other open source projects, and has integration support for Github so users didn’t have to make yet another account. Github itself introduced their Discussions feature 1.5 year ago and it was adopted by Crazyswarm (1 and 2). At that time it was only possible to have one discussion tab per repository, and with our 60 (!) repos this didn’t seem to be an option… until recently! Once they released their organization level discussion feature about a 1.5 months ago, we were sold. There is no better Github integration than being on Github itself and with our many repos, this is something we definitely need.
How to use Discussions?
The forum and discussions are quite different in style which takes a little getting used to. The old forum used a classic ‘thread’, which shows exactly the chronological way of the conversation. Discussions uses an approach similar to Stack Overflow, where you can also reply on intermediate answers in that thread.
Where to start a discussion?
If you see the discussion page, you notice a couple of categories. These are still the standards as given by github, but we think these will work for us as well:
Announcements: Here is where Bitcraze places announcements in regards of discussions. You can not add announcements yourself but you can reply to them, but do not start a generic support question here.
General: Just for generic discussions and saying hi!
Ideas: If you have any ideas for enhancements for the Bitcraze ecosystem, place them here!
Polls: Same as announcements from Bitcraze, but we will use these to poll a certain opinion.
Q&A: Here is were all the support questions go! Make sure to read the support rules for this.
Show & Tell: Show your awesome Crazyflie projects here!
Labels
We first had categories at the forum, which was supposed to separate the discussion in a functional way. In reality, sometimes it was difficult to really separate the issues in those very categories as it overlapped many functionalities. Now in Github discussions, we are able to label these based on the topic, and even add more labels if it indeed overlaps multiple topics. From this, we will also be able to filter out support question about a certain topic which will make it easier for us to have a good look of all support for a certain product or functionality.
So please try to label your support question! But if you haven’t, we will probably do it for you.
Issue or Discussion?
Especially since we are on Github discussions, it might be difficult now to determine when to start an issue at an individual repository and when to start discussion. I really like the explanation that Github itself used to explain the difference:
Discussions are great for questions and ideas that require team communication to make a decision, while Issues are defined pieces of work.
So if you know of a bug/problem, or you want to to propose an enhancement that you know the specific repository of, go ahead and make an issue right in that repo. If you have a problem and you are not sure what is causing it, discussions is the place to go (preferably in Q&A). If there is any ‘pieces of work’ that comes from that discussion, the maintainer can generate an issue in the related repository and link it to the discussion. Other way around, any questions in any issue list that we think is too generic, we will moderate and move it to the organization discussions.
Get involved!
Of course at Bitcraze we will try to help out, but what we really would like is for you to help with answering questions as well! Start up and chat with a topic that you are interested in, or show a small video of your Crazyflie doing something fun. One thing that we would love is the community to be as vibrant as it used to be, were we not only ask support questions, but to discuss and share! It doesn’t have to be big, like you can vote on this Poll to voice your opinion about our move, or vote up / add a smiley to any discussion that you find important.
Also we are planning to have a developer meeting in a few weeks, on the 22nd of June (just before the holidays), so please see the discussion/poll here for more information.
