We’re getting close to the end of the year and as usual we look back at what has been going on at Bitcraze.
Community
This year we had a booth at ICRA in London. We were also involved in starting the “Aerial Robotics Community Working Group” for ROS and the ROScon keynote in New Orleans together with Dronecode foundation.
We have been hosting developer meetings this year in an attempt to spread information, get feedback and have live discussions:
- The Crazyflie communication stack
- The Loco Positioning System
- Safety features for brushless motors
- The Autonomous demo
- The Webots simulator
- The Crazyflie Lib and other news
- How to handle the increasing complexity of the expansion decks
- Simulation plans
- The Flow deck
They are all available on YouTube if you missed them.
Guest blog posts
We have had lots of interesting blog posts from our users this year!
- From Crazyflies to “Crazybats”
- Drones in the dance performance “Flying bodies across the fields”
- Flapper Drones and positioning systems
- Come move with drones in beautiful, curious, and provocative ways at the second Drone Arena Challenge!
- TU Delft Science Centre Swarming Lab
- High school students learn about electrical engineering with the Crazyflie
- AMSwarm: An Alternating Minimization Approach for Safe Motion Planning of Quadrotor Swarms
- Tired of crashing? Use Open Gimbal!
- Adaptive Cooperative Flight for Transportation using Crazyflies
New hardware
A number of new exciting products are available in our store
- 350 mAh battery
- The Crazyflie as a bare PCB
- The 47-17 propellers
- The Crazyradio 2.0
- The Flapper Nimble
- The thrust upgrade kit
We have also been working on some new products that are not ready for the store yet, these include the Crazyflie 2.1 brushless, an improved lighthouse deck and some other things we will write about in coming blog posts – stay tuned for exciting news!
Software
There have been 3 releases during 2023
The big picture when it comes to the software is that there has been some work done on estimators and controllers, including “out-of-tree support” to make it easy to add to your own. We have worked on support for brushless motors, including safety features like the supervisor and arming functionality. The client has been upgraded to use PyQt6 instead of PyQt5.
There has been a bit of a focus on stability, partly by us in the infinite flight project, but also at TU Delft in their 24/7 swarm.
Bitcraze
Exciting things have been happening in the office as well! Hanna did an internship in the beginning of the year and Sofia has joined us to help with packing while Kristoffer unfortunately is leaving for new adventures. We have also expanded our flight lab, and right now it feels gigantic, it will take some time to get used to the new large size!
As always when writing the yearly looking back blog post, we are amazed at all the things that have been going on during the year. Thanks for joining us on our journey!