Marcus and Arnaud have packed up and left the Berlin Maker Faire after two hectic days. and last weekend Tobias and I were at Maker Fair New York. It’s a lot of fun showing the Crazyflie, meeting people and getting feedback from the community!
This time we had created a demo where we used a webcam to track the position of the Crazyflie (see older blog post). I really like the demo, it’s pretty minimalistic and shows the awesome capabilities of the Crazyflie as a platform that enables the user to explore and develop on top of it. Just add a webcam, AR-tag some control algorithms, imagination and engineering and you have an autonomously flying Crazyflie!
When Tobias and I arrived at the New York Maker Faire on Friday afternoon to set up the demo, we discovered that our booth was not indoors, but under a roof without walls. And it was windy!
There was no way the control algorithms could manage to keep the Crazyflie at its taget position, so what to do? We tried various ways of tethering it with a string while still flying, but without any success. We had to resort to hanging the copter in a string, but not really flying it. To at least get some use of the positioning system, we used the position of the hanging copter to change the color and intensity of LED-rings on four other copters that we put in the corners of the test rig. Not what we hoped for but what do you do?
My favourite gadget at the New York fare was the Pancake Bot – a must in every home!
The Berlin Maker Faire was organized for the first time last weekend. The venue was a bit smaller than other Maker Faires we’ve been to, but there was lots of interesting visitors and it was held in a very nice old railway-postal building. Fred from our community joined us during the fair and gave us some much needed support in the booth. As for the demo it was working better, but we still had some issues with lighting and the detection of the AR-tag. Room for improvement.
The fair had a drone area, but unfortunately not a lot of drones. We were flying the Crazyflie 2.0 as well as a bigger quad using the Big Quad deck. Aside from that Fred brought a long his even bigger quad that uses the Open Pilot CC 3D.
Big thanks to Fred for showing us Berlin and helping us out!
Thanks for coming to Berlin!
Tiny correction: My big quad (F330 clone) currently uses a KK-Mini flight controller. But only until I can replace it with the Crazyflie and the motor deck. ;)