Last week and this week is busy with preparations for the New York and Berlin maker faires. Since we will be in the Seeedstudio booth we don’t have the same space as at the Bay Area Maker Faire, so we had to rebuild our “fly-cage”. The new specs are 1.7 x 0.7 x 0.7 meters. This is the area the Crazyflie 2.0 should be able to fly in for a full charge without touching the sides on the net.
We don’t have any special plans during the faire, except for flying during the day. So if you feel like meeting up, having a beer and getting lost in various technology discussions then leave a comment or drop us a mail.
The autonomous flying rig we used in bay-area was using the Kinect 2 sensor. This new rig is only using a standard webcam which is cheaper and easier to manage (ie. we do not need a Windows computer anymore). We are attaching an augmented reality marker on the top of Crazyflie and the image processing is mostly done by the ArUco library. ArUco is detecting the position of the Marker in 3D and the position is sent via zeromq to the controller. We used the same controller code as for the Kinect, we just had to tune it a bit better to keep in the smaller space. Then the controller is sending pitch/roll/yaw to the Crazyflie client setup to have a ZMQ as input device.
If you want to build the same cage then here’s a list of the parts:
- Some kind of net (we used normal fishing net)
- Fishing line (to tighten the cage)
- Aluminium beam (for tents)
- These 3D printed parts
- Webcam with standard camera attachment (we use Logitech C920)
- Camera attachment screw
We are in the process of cleaning up the code for the webcam. It will be pushed on Github and we will document the build on the Wiki.