This Christmas, Bitcraze is sending out a callout to Santa. As it turns out, one of our Brushless prototypes has a lifelong dream of becoming one of Santa’s reindeer. In a hopeful attempt to fulfill its wishes, we shot a video to prove that it’s ready for Santa’s most elite aerial team!
Imagine a tiny, determined drone with big dreams, practicing its sleigh route moves with the intensity of an Olympic athlete. Our little Brushless is proving it has what it takes to join the North Pole’s premier delivery squad.
Going through small openings, avoiding obstacles, and flying in perfect precision are skills that any good reindeer should have – but here, the Brushless accomplish this in an autonomous flight, and in a much smaller and more practical package than Rudolph and consorts.
Of course, there’s some technical magic behind this Christmas miracle. For this project, we relied on stock firmware and Python library, taking advantage of the new spiral and constant velocity features (check out the GitHub PR here). These features added variety and fluidity to the maneuvers, moving beyond straight lines and making the flight more interesting. By using the high-level commander, we took a simpler approach compared to trajectory optimization, which we’ve used in past Christmas videos. Trajectory optimization would have been far more difficult for this project due to the unique challenges of the flight path—namely its length and the need for pinpoint accuracy near obstacles and through gates.
Positioning relied on four Lighthouse base stations, which we used to manually locate the Christmas wreaths by holding the drone within each one to log their exact coordinates. This project also gave us the opportunity to further integrate the Brushless into our firmware and Python libraries, setting the stage for a smoother launch in the new year. The Brushless impressed us yet again during this project. Even though we’ve tested it extensively in the past, seeing it navigate tight gates with such precision and handle the demanding flight path reinforced just how capable it is. Working with it in this setting has made us even more excited to release it soon and share its potential with everyone.
Santa, if you’re reading this, we think we’ve found your next top reindeer recruit. You can watch the full audition tape here or below:
And if you think what you just saw is a pretty straight-forward and easy path, think again! This year’s blooper video highlights the resilience of the Crazyflie 2.1 Brushless and the fast, iterative workflow we used for this project. Since testing reliability and resilience was a key goal, we adopted a workflow that allowed for quick scripting, flying, and adjusting—often completing the cycle in just minutes. This approach made crashes more likely, especially during the spiral sections where the drone struggled to keep up and started cutting corners. While we resolved the issue by slowing those sections down, we suspect that more aggressive tuning of the Mellinger controller could have helped the drone maintain speed without cutting corners. The Brushless managed some impressive recoveries, but even minor collisions usually meant it couldn’t keep pace with the rest of the trajectory. After all the trial and error, we had a stable and reliable setup that not only performed well for the demo but also flew beautifully when we showed it to our families at the Christmas party.
Here is what our Brushless could endure during training:
Merry Christmas from all of us at Bitcraze – where even our prototypes have holiday dreams!