Even though we are getting closer to Christmas and hopefully some well deserved rest, there are lots of things going on at Bitcraze. This week we have collected news about various topics that we wanted to share with you.
China
Tobias and Marcus visited our Chinese manufacturer Seeed last week in Shenzen. We are trying to visit Seeed at least once a year to meet in person rather than only via the internet.
huaqiangbei
It is always a great experience to visit Shenzen and it seems as things are moving at blazing speed over there, with amazing changes from year to year. Such as that you can now paying with face recognition in the grocery store and park you car in automatic parking garages.
Lighthouse deck
We are making progress on the Lighthouse front and we have a preliminary hardware design for the first version of the deck. There are still a lot of things to be done but we hope we will be able to order the first batch soon and that it will be available in our store the first quarter next year.
Qi charger V1.2 deck
The Qi charger deck is compatible with the Qi V1 standard. Recently we have been testing the deck with a new off-the-shelf charger and discovered that the deck was not working with the new charger. After investigating we discovered that the Qi deck is not compatible with the new Qi V1.2 chargers. We started a redesign of the board and we have now started to produce a batch of Qi deck V1.2 that is compatible with Qi 1.2 chargers. The new Qi deck will be released early January.
Roadrunner
The Roadrunner is our first stand alone Tag for the Loco Positioning System. It is in essence a Crazyflie with an integrated LPS deck but without motors and a different form factor, it was initially developed for an external project to track go-karts on a racing track. The Roadrunner can be fitted to anything that you want to track in a Loco Positioning System, a ground robot for instance. Since it is based on the Crazyflie, all the libraries and tools that are available in the Bitcraze eco-system are compatible. We plan to start selling the Roadrunner in our store in the beginning of next year.