New release, 2023.11

2023-12-04 | Kimberly McGuire | Leave a comment

Before we start settling down and preparing for Christmas, it’s time for another release! The last one was before the summer in July, and we’ve had quite a few changes on the development master branch that we’d like to share. You can now download the latest Cfclient through pip and install the newest firmware on the Crazyflie to 2023.11 via the CFclient.

Latest changes in CFclient and Cflib

The most significant change in the CFclient is that we have finally transitioned from QT5 to QT6 for the GUI graphics. Additionally, we have addressed some issues with the toolboxes. Finally, we have added an information box to indicate the state of the supervisor, such as whether the Crazyflie is considered tumbled, flying, or if a restart is required because it is locked.

*Cfclient when the crazyflie is tumbled with supervisor info*

For the backend, namely the Crazyflie Python library, some important changes have been implemented. Along with fixes to the parameter and logging framework, full-state setpoints have been introduced. This feature has existed in firmware for a while due to the Crazyswarm1 project (now Crazyswarm2), but it wasn’t implemented in the cflib until now. Additionally, it’s now necessary to use `notify_setpoint_stop` in cases of switching between high-level setpoints and regular position setpoints. There is also a generic motion capture example now based on the libmotioncapture library.

Note that even though the CFclient has been converted to QT6, there are several examples in the Cflib folder that have not been updated yet. This will be fixed soon, and a ticket has been created for it. Additionally, in the Bitcraze-VM, there have been some reported issues with QT6 (see this ticket).

Latest changes in the firmware

The firmware has undergone some important changes too. On the STM side of things, the hybrid TDOA mode has been merged (check out this recent blog post). This feature is still considered experimental, so please refer to the documentation for the right settings. Additionally, support for the supervisor information box in the CFclient has been added. To utilize it, both the firmware and CFclient need to be updated. There is also a new example demonstrating communication between gap8 and cpx. Last but not least, it is now possible to create Python bindings for portions of the Kalman filter, mainly for the Loco positioning system. On the other hand, the NRF firmware has no added functionalities except for some build changes and fixes.

Crazyradio2 + LPS tools

We’ve also made some improvements in other firmware or tools. Starting with the Crazyradio2, which includes fixes for broadcasting (important for you Crazyswarm2 folks!). We also aimed to make a new release of LPS tools since we heard that people were experiencing issues with USB devices. Unfortunately, there are some problems with the GitHub release actions, so that will likely be delayed. For anyone facing USB issues, you can install the LPS tools from source with Python following the ReadMe’s instructions.

Release details and Remaining issues

So here are the details of all that is released:

Some things still require attention that are a bit affected by this release, but we haven’t had the time to fix it yet:

Fix issues with LPS tools and release (see this ticket)
CFclient seems to be broken on the bitcraze-VM (see this ticket)
CFlib examples with QT-based GUI are still on QT5 (see this ticket)
The newest CFclient seems to need additional packages in some cases ( see this and this ticket)

Please let us know at https://discussions.bitcraze.io if you are having more problems.

Developer meeting this Wednesday

As we already announced last week in the Monday blog post, we will be having a developer meeting this Wednesday (6th Dec, 3 pm CET) regarding the Flow deck (refer to this discussion thread for joining information). Since we usually don’t fill up the entire hour, the last part of the developer meeting is available for some generic support questions face-to-face (online), including questions about the release!

New release 2022.03

2022-03-28 | Kimberly McGuire | 1 Comment

There is a new fresh release of both the firmware and the python library and client! The last release (2022.01) was from 2 months ago but we already added quite some extra functionality so we wanted to make a snapshot of this before continuing on other priorities.

Kbuild on CF firmware

One of the biggest changes that you will notice, is that there is now a new way to configure your Crazyflie firmware before building it. The old config.mk is gone and you will now need to either automatically generate a config file or generate one with the menuconfig, of which kbuild is most known for. For more information, please read the blogpost about this latest change, for the exception that we do prefer the users to use ‘make cf2_config’ as instructed in the 2022.03 version of the repo documentation.

Platform support for Bolt

We now defined the Bolt as a different platform. That means that for each release, there should now also be a bolt flavor zip file, next to the cf2 and tag zips, as you can see in the release page. Moreover, if you want to build the firmware to be Bolt compatible, you would first need to do ‘make bolt_defconfig’ to generate the needed configs with kbuild. For more information of how to add your own custom platform, please check out these instructions.

2+ Lighthouse base stations (experimental)

For those that feel constrained by the max 2 lighthouse base station support in the firmware and client, this functionality is now part of the release. This blogpost will explain more about this, and it is still experimental in nature, as you would need to reconfigure the firmware with… you guessed it: Kbuild! Also the geometry estimation needs to be done as a separate python script as well all from the Crazyflie python library. No worries, if you still prefer using the cfclient, it still uses the old way of estimating if you click the button, but just remember that you would need to do something extra in order to get 2+ base station support.

New VM release

We were also made aware of a pretty big error in the bitcraze VM, namely that we still used the old git:// type url for github repositories. IN the new release of the bitcraze VM this should be fixed, so please download the new one, or fix it yourself in your current VM by changing the remote URLs of the github repos you are working on to https://.

New release: 2022.1

2022-01-31 | Jonas Danielsson | Leave a comment

We are thrilled to announce the new 2022.1 release of the Crazyflie firmwares, library and client! There have been a lot of bug fixes, polishing and new features and we are glad we finally get to share it with all of you.

Noteworthy features and fixes

The features and fixes listed here is only a subset of all the bug fixes and other additions we have done in the last six months. For a more complete view, please check the release notes on GitHub.

Crazyflie STM firmware — Main firmware

Release notes on GitHub

We now allow the creation of persistent parameters in the firmware
- This enables you to set a value that will remain across resets and even across upgrades
Matěj Karásek added support for …
- … non-standard IMU orientation …
- … improved CPPM: deadband, AETR & TAER channel mapping … and …
- … PID position control in body-aligned coordinates
It is now possible to override and control the onboard LEDs from ground
- This is achieved by setting a new parameter: led.bitmask
- Using this one could, for instance, implement a stealth mode with no LEDs active

James Preiss implemented a new push-based high-level commander
There is now an attempt to gracefully shutdown when you press the power button
- The main driver for this was to avoid SD card corruption

While implementing the autonomous swarm demo for BAM days Kristoffer found and fixed issues and bugs in our Peer-to-peer (P2P) implementation

Crazyflie NRF firmware — Radio and power management

Release notes on GitHub

We now report the version of the NRF firmware on the Crazyflie console

Found and fixed a couple of issues with BLE and P2P
It is now possible to control the blue LED via the syslink protocol

Crazyflie Python library — The official Python API

Release notes on GitHub

We increased the minimum Python version required to 3.7
- Python 3.6 is not officially supported by python.org anymore
An initial version of persistent parameter API was added
- As well as an example script
A new connection query parameter rate_limit= was added to the radio URI
- The idea is that will help with air-time when doing P2P connections
It is now possible to debug the radio communication using Wireshark

Added support for compressed trajectories for the High Level Commander
- With example script showing the functionality
Switch to using the Pypi packaged libusb library
- This will simplify the usage of the lib in MacOS and allow the use of the winUSB driver on Windows
We no longer set the PID controller by default in the PositionHLCommander
- Since this could lead to surprising behavior when the cfclient instantiated the commander
Some helpers so get estimated positions have been added to the Swarm class

Crazyflie Client — The Crazyflie PC client

Release notes on GitHub

Rework of the Parameters tab
- To better show parameter documentation and to include persistent functionality

Image of the Crayzflie PC client with new parameter tab — New Parameters tab with filtering search and sidebar with more information about values

We fixed problems with receiving Loco data
Adjust to new QTM version in the Qualisys tab
Make sure we support Python 3.10

Documentation

Along with all the new features, bug fixes and general polish of our software we have also spent time making sure our documentation is up-to-date and relevant! You can check it out on our website. Do not forget to check out the individual repositories documentation. And the tutorial page has gotten some love this cycle, check it out!

Please go forth and install this new release and please file issues with any problem you find!

Where to get it?

The firmware images for the Crazyflie STM firmware and the Crazyflie NRF firmware should already be available through the cfclient. And if you want to download them yourself you can find them at https://github.com/bitcraze/crazyflie-firmware/releases.

The Crazyflie Client and the Crazyflie Python library are available through Pypi (The Python Package Index), to install them you can use the following commands:

$ python3 -m pip install --upgrade cfclient # to install or upgrade the Crazyflie client

$ python3 -m pip install --upgrade cflib # to install or upgrade the Crazyflie Python libraryCode language: PHP (php)

Happy hacking!