What’s in store for 2022?

2022-01-03 | Barbara | Leave a comment

We’ve had an exciting year in 2021, and we’re eager to see what 2022 will bring ! Let’s see what’s in the pipeline and what we hope for this new year.

Products

The AI deck and Bolt out of Early Access

We’ve put a lot of efforts during these last months on working with the AI deck’s firmware and infrastructure. With great help of our intern Rik, we managed to make huge leaps, and hopefully sometimes in the coming months we’ll be able to share what we worked on. I can already tell you that the incoming release will bring some needed improvements on flashing on the GAP8 chip and improved image streaming! As the AI deck is one of the most challenging of our decks, we also hope to add an extensive tutorial (that we call the “mega tutorial”) to help you working with it.

Also we have started to push some framework changes to make it easier for you to make bigger drones with the Crazyflie Bolt. One of those are the persistent parameter system that we have recently implemented on the Crazyflie’s, so we will add more and more of these types of features. The hope is, is that we are able to provide some kind of assembly kit for a larger Bolt-based drone, of which we already did some initial battery investigations for.

Prototypes

Fun Fridays are usually our time to play around with new possibilities and prototypes. Marcus has already made great strides, and hopefully in 2022 we’ll be able to go even farther with those. Arnaud has also been working on the much waited new iteration of the Crazyradio, with a new chip and an improved communication protocol. Tobias, our dedicated hardware man, has also ideas down the pipes in the form of a brushless Crazyflie as we already showed in our future plans presentation of November’s BAMdays. Also we hope to initiate the design process of a new and improved version of the Crazyflie with more power and processing capabilities.

People and Collaborations

Last year we have continued our close collaboration with researchers at institutes and universities, to help them out with achieving their goals and contribute their work to our opensource firmware and software. It proves really fruitful, both for us and the people we talk to, so we hope 2022 will see yet again closer and newer connections.

We were really happy with our first own online conference, which helped us reconnect and talk to our community about all the awesomeness achieved with the Crazyflies. We hope to implement something similar on a more regular basis, to keep talking about collaborations, possibilities, and in general sharing all the work that’s been done on the platform. Those “lightweight” BAM should arrive soon, so keep updated if you want to join them!

Component shortage and productions issues

We expect to still deal with the component shortage, as it is expected to last for at least another year, even two. Production is therefore a continuous challenge, with a lot of unpredictability, and we will find better solutions to deal with it in 2022. Thankfully, we have good hopes on keeping good stock levels throughout the crisis, as we’ve increased our stock. We’ll of course keep you updated on any big updates regarding the crisis and how it is affecting it us.

Unfortunately, the component shortage also means that it’s harder to make prototypes. It’s difficult to find and/or buy just one chip, so it causes delays in our creative hardware developments. It is what it is… but we will sure be able to find solutions – as we did during our 10 years’ history!

Anything else?

Of course our heads are always full of ideas and we are passionate to work on anything! We have ambitions in developing a simulation for our users or CI, doing more measurements with the new thrust stand or adding further improvements to our documentation and tutorials. And we might also meet new interesting people (digitally or in person?) who might give us enough inspiration to start something completely new! Soon we will have our quarterly meeting, where we try to herd and select our passions and ideas into conceivable plans and actions.

With all these exciting projects, we’re really excited to see what 2022 has in store for us! I hope you too have an awesome year 2022.

Looking back at 2021

2021-12-27 | Barbara | Leave a comment

2021 is coming to an end. As we’re about to flip the page on a new calendar, let’s take a look at what happened during this past year.

Community

It’s no news to you, but keeping in touch with our community during a pandemic has forced us to try new ways to meet and interact. The main event for us this year has been the BAM days: our first conference held entirely by ourselves, full of exciting talks and fun, and we’re very happy with how it went down! You can still watch the talks we hosted during those three days in our dedicated Youtube playlist.

Guest blogposts

Once again, we’ve had the honor to host some awesome guests on our blog, which you can read (or re-read) here:

Software

We had 3 releases this year, (one in January, one in March and one in June). We worked a lot on improving things like the Crazyflie logging and parameter interface or wondered how to deal with our API. We’ve also implemented a new way to store things, and we now have new, powerful persistent parameters.

Thanks to Jonas’ hardwork, we also set up a “crazy lab” here in Malmö. During Fun Friday, Arnaud has been experimenting with Rust, working on a webclient.

Hardware

We’ve been dealing since 2020 with a hardware crisis. The component shortage has made production erratic and difficult, and for the first time in Bitcraze’s history, we’ve had to increase our prices.

Lighthouse

The first part of the year was dedicated to the Lighthouse system. At the beginning of the year, we finally got it out of early access. We documented the new Lighthouse Functionality and even wrote a paper for ICRA about the Lighthouse accuracy with Wolfgang’s help. We created the Lighthouse swarm bundle, getting every element to fly a swarm with this positioning system.

AI deck

We worked a lot on the AI deck this year. We upgraded to the AI deck 1.1, with a gray-scale camera and a newer version of the GAP-8. Part of this work was also to improve the documention and informations we had on it. We had a workshop with PULP, and dreamed of a mega-tutorial.

Documentation

As usual, we’ve been trying to improve our documentation. This year, it included an API reference in our Python library , and rethinking our structure

Bitcraze

Bitcraze has once again increased in numbers, as we welcomed into our ranks Jonas. We were also really happy to add Wolfgang to the team for a few months, as well as Rik, an intern from MAV-lab.

The biggest event this year for us was our 10 year anniversary. That’s right, Bitcraze turned 10 in September, and we tried to celebrate it as much as possible ! With a nice outing and with the BAM days, but also with a video trying to show what 10 years of Bitcraze looks like:

Santa’s flying helpers

2021-12-20 | Barbara | Leave a comment

Christmas is just around the corner, and it’s time for the traditionnal Christmas video! This year, we wanted to use the AI deck as we’ve been working hard on this deck for some time now. Showcasing its new feature in this festive video seemed the best idea.

Santa this year needed help to find and get the presents delivered, so he asked for help from Bitcraze! Let’s see how it played out:

I’m sure you’re wondering how we managed to set this up, so let’s discuss how we did it!

Picking up the packages

The goal was to pick up some packages and place them in the sleigh, and it all worked out pretty well. All the flying in the video is scripted using the python lib and positioning is done using Qualisys’ motion capture system with Active marker decks. The trajectories are hard coded and with some careful adjustments we managed to lift and fly the 4 crazyflies attached to the same present, even though it was a bit wobbly from time to time. Getting the present into the sleigh was not as easy, and we might have taken some short cuts here as well as when attaching/removing lines.

Sometimes detangling the wires was a teamwork

Picking up the second package needed some precision, and it went incredibly well, on the first try! The present was very light and needed someone to hold it, to prevent it from moving when the Crazyflie approached.

Getting the sleigh off

Our first tries included 5 strings attached to the sleigh, but it was difficult to get the right tension at the right time to have the UAVs actually pull the weight. Here came the “rubber band solution”: we just attached all the strings to a rubber band, that was itself attached to the sleight. That way, the tension could get even when all the Crazyflies were in the air and ready to pull the sleight.

The AI deck camera/streamer

When we started this project, the intention was to run a neural network in the AI-deck to identify or classify the presents. We did not manage to get to a point where we had something that actually added value to the story, so we settled for just streaming the video from the AI-deck camera on the scouting drone instead.

The AI-deck example with color camera viewer is still under development, but if you want to give it a try you can take a look at the readme in the github repo.

Bloopers

And finally, as an added bonus, if you ever wonder how many tries it takes to make 5 Crazyflies pull a sleigh, here is a little behind-the-scenes video too!

BAM days are a wrap !

2021-10-25 | Barbara | Leave a comment

The last week was epic. We had 3 days of our online conference, the BAM days – I’m sure you’ve heard of them by now.

We are really happy with how everything went down. During those 3 days, 142 people attended, which is a highest number than we could have expected. The Welkom platform we used was stellar, allowing us to use Mibo rooms for very fruitful discussions after each talk.

Quiz and community Q&A

We took the opportunity to talk to our community, which is something we didn’t have the opportunity to do in a long time. Your insights and feedback were greatly appreciated and we have a lot to think about in the next coming weeks on how to best use all the remarks we got.

We also had a short quiz about Bitcraze, and we were quite impressed with how you performed ! And interesting to note that the hardest question for you was how many decks we sell (it’s 16, if you want to cheat on our hypothetical next quiz)

As I’ve mentioned, after each event we gathered in Mibo rooms. Even though attendance there was not as high as we would have liked, we still got quality time with community members, speakers, collaborators, even first-timers that were interested in the Crazyflie. We really love this platform, making us feel almost like meeting in real life. We even had some karaoke in Mibo during the closing party (which MAY be a good excuse to end the day for those who listened)

Content

Our external speakers presented a lot of interesting work. It was a great pleasure and honor to welcome every one of them as they explained their latest work. I have to admit that it’s rewarding to see such smart people doing awesome and cool research with our products.

We did our share too, with workshops and demos. Kristoffer’s autonomous demo using distributed consensus required a lot of work but worked perfectly in the end. Here is a small excerpt:

What now?

Now, we’re feeling as everyone is feeling the day after a party: exhausted, happy, and wondering what to do next. Hopefully we have some plans for that !

If you missed the conference, we created a Youtube playlist where you can watch everything that you missed. During the next few days, we’ll update the event page with BAM’s presentations too so you will have the opportunity to catch up. Some of our workshops will also turn into tutorials or documentations of some kind, but we’re still just cleaning up.

We are so happy with how everything went that we are already thinking about a future BAM. This one was exceptional, of course, since it was at first to celebrate our 10 year anniversary (and I have to admit that we’re all a little bit tired after 3 intense days), so we’re not going to be able to top that. But we are considering making BAM a fixed point in our agenda (and yours, let’s hope). We don’t how, we don’t know when, but one thing is sure: BAM is just beginning.

Kimberly on a different continent

On a totally different note, Kimberly is flying to the US this week: if any of you America-based wants to grab the occasion to have a more time-zone appropriate conversation with one of us, you will have a few weeks to make it possible!

Before BAM days

2021-10-18 | Barbara | Leave a comment

I’m sure you know about it by now, but as a reminder, the BAM days are this week !
We’re all are really excited about it – and, let’s be honest, a little nervous too as the day grows nearer.

We are really happy to see that so many of you plan on joining us. We have more than 100 people registered to the event, which is actually the highest estimate we were hoping for. By the way, if you are registered to the event, dismiss the Event Brite email you got on Sunday and prefer the direct Welkom link you’ve been sent: the process is much easier if you use the latest. If you did sign up, but haven’t received an email with any link (even after checking your spamfolder) , please send us an email at contact@bitcraze.io!

Our workshops are all ready and we’re proud to present you our selected subjects. Each one of us will get the opportunity to talk about an area he cares about, so if you attend the whole event you will get also the chance to meet all of us. Of course, the social fika will also be the perfect place to meet us, so don’t hesitate to jump in the Mibo room we’ve set up!

There are also keynote speakers that we’re honored to host, close collaborators whose work we admire. It will be really interesting to hear from them, whether about Motion Capture or swarms.

There are been a few changes on the agenda:

On Wednesday morning, we’ll have a second session of the quiz. Those that missed it on Tuesday evening can then also get a chance of winning the one and only Goldenflie. It will be followed by a community Q&A: if you have any questions unanswered, it will be the time to ask them! In the afternoon, Arnaud will talk about Rust and the App layer after Greenwaves’s talk (and not on the morning as announced before).
If you’re interested in swarms, Friday morning will be perfect for you as we have a double feature: Wolfgang will present his CrazySwarm and Jonas will follow with a presentation about using the CFlib to fly a swarm. Afterwards, they will have a panel discussion on swarm management.

There is also a demo programmed on Friday. We haven’t told much about it yet because we wanted to be sure it was possible to do before we promised anything, but I can tell now that on Friday, you will be able to see an autonomous swarm making distributed decisions. It’s the first time we’re trying something like that and you don’t want to miss it !

All the info is here.

Just be aware that during the BAM days, we won’t be as reactive on answering our emails or the forum, as most of us will be on the platform, but we’ll still be shipping orders.

See you tomorrow !

See you at BAM days!

2021-10-11 | Barbara | Leave a comment

The BAM days are coming up !

Only 8 days left before the first Bitcraze-organized conference ever. We are really excited about it, and this coming week is pretty much dedicated to organize the conference. We’re working hard on getting the best experience possible for there 3 days, both for us and for you. That means collaborating with great speakers, creating awesome workshops, but also think about the best way to come together – one of the main purpose behind the BAM days.

It’s been a couple of months since we decided that we wanted to organize our own conference. The main idea behind it was that we missed going to conferences, meeting people and talking with a lot of interesting persons.

Bitcraze turning 10 felt like a big occasion that we wanted to celebrate. And indeed we did, internally, but we wanted to share this accomplishment with you too. An online conference seemed like the best idea. So when time came to choose a platform for it, we looked for something which put emphasis on social experience. We finally went with the Welkom platform, from the Netherlands. It’s easy and natural to use, with a simple interface, and lots of options for us to organize different activities.

The Welkom platform we’ll use hosts two different Mibo rooms. It’s a spatial chat, where your avatar can run around a 3D world, discovering different environments. Your camera is your head, so you’ll need a webcam to join. There are some fun activities around, plenty interactive stuff, from chairs to basketballs. We have used it to for our coffee breaks when we were working from home, and had fun using this world: we’ll be happy to meet you there and hope you’ll find it fun too.

The plan is to have between each talk or workshop at least 30 minutes in Mibo to talk to the speakers, take a coffee break, discuss the exciting things that’s been happening, and generally catch up in ways we haven’t be able to the past year.

At the end of each day, we’ve programmed social events to gather together. On Tuesday, we’ll host a special quizz. Telling you its content may be a bit cheating, but if we’ve read our blogposts regularly, the questions should not seem hard to you. For the winner, a once-in-a-lifetime reward: a GoldenFlie ! You will be able to put it in your chimney mantle with your others awards, or actually use it – because, yes, it flies!

The second day, Wednesday, we’ll have a roundtable with Q&A. A perfect occasion for us to get feedback from you, and for you to ask us all the questions you have been burning to ask us.

The last day (Thursday), we’ll talk a little about Bitcraze and its future: where it is headed. We’ll then have a last party – in Mibo of course.

All the program and other useful information is in our event page. We really hope you’ll take some time to come by and say hello !

BAM days program

2021-09-06 | Barbara | Leave a comment

As you maybe remember, we decided to celebrate our 10 years anniversary with our very own conference. It’s going to be 3 days of online meeting, sharing and generally awesome meetups to connect, learn, and hopefully develop new knowledges and acquaintances.

We are working hard on creating the best experience possible for you ! The program is still only a skeleton with some very interesting bones, and we add more and more flesh to it as the dates grow nearer.

As you can see from the program below, each day is organized around a global theme. Let’s break them down:

The first day, Tuesday, is going to be dedicated to navigation systems. Guest speakers Klaus Kefferputz from Hochscule Auburg and Joseph La Delfa (the man behind Drone Chi). will each talk about how they use positioning systems, in two very different ways. We’ll also have a workshop about the different positioning systems we support, to get into the more nitty gritty side of things.

The next day, we’ll talk about the AI deck ! Our collaborators at PULP-platform and Greenwaves Technologies are the perfect guests to talk about our newest deck. The talks will be followed by a workshop about app layers and a general panel discussion about Bitcraze – and more particularly its future. We want to hear from you, so don’t hesitate to join us as we try to determine a way forward (for the next 10 years, we have some ideas but we’re curious what you think)!

And finally, the last day will revolve around swarms. It’s Wolfgang‘s specialization, so he is of course the first guest we turned to. Bart Duisterhof and Guido de Croon from Delft University of Technology will also talk about their autonomous swarm, (they are the team behind the sniffy bug!). A swarm workshop will follow, and we will close the conference with some fun surprises!

We’re really excited and lucky to welcome all those speakers to talk about drone development. The program is not entirely fixed yet, some surprise guests should turn up. You can also still add your input by filling out this short survey.

And last, but not least : you can register to the event here on EventBrite. You will be able to add it to your calendar and finally mark the dates ! Also checkout the BAM days event page occasionally for updates.

10 years of Bitcraze

2021-08-30 | Barbara | 3 Comments

On September, 1st of 2011, Arnaud, Marcus and Tobias signed a paper in Lund registering their brand-new company: Bitcraze. We’re here, now, 10 years later, hardly believing this gamble paid off so greatly.

Bitcraze’s story actually begins in 2009, when the 3 met in their day job and started dreaming about what will become the Crazyflie. For a long time, they combined a 9-to-5 job with the development of the nanodrone. Monday meetings run from the end of the workday until 2am, and they were exhausted, but the hard work paid off when we know now how many Crazyflies took off after that!

Some things have been added since 2011, of course! For starters, 4 more people joined the team, each changing the face of the company, making it evolve. Lean and self-organized was the way to go, the more people there was. The product itself changed and grew: from the first batch of Crazyflies, that had to be soldered out of the box, we’re now at the 2.1 version. And as years flew by, Bitcraze added to its backpack with new decks and extensions, always wanting to test new things and generally make awesome stuff. From its first flight, we’re now at impressive autonomous swarm flights!

The Crazyflie celebrating its first year in 2012! (and yes, it flew with the candle on it)

In 10 years, we’ve also done things we would never have thought of. Did you know Marcus gave a 15 minutes speech at a conference … entirely in French ? Or that 3 different employees got a cut on their finger for the exact same reason (we’ll let you guess why!) ? We’re still amazed at how much we discovered, learned and shared in those 10 years.

For us, it’s a special moment, looking back at 10 years of awesome things, of hard work, and of passion. We plan on celebrating, of course! First with a few days’ getaway, the first occasion we’ve had in a while to be actually together and enjoy. But this milestone would not be happening without all the support of those around us: our family and friends of course, but also our contributors and our customers. That’s why we’ve decided to organize our own conference, to gather everyone for awesome days of meetup and celebrate with you!

Keep an eye out on our social media too, as this September we’ll look back a little down the road. We’ll post some fond memories (and maybe, just maybe, some embarrassing photos too!) and see how much we’ve accomplished in 10 years.

The Lighthouse Swarm bundle

2021-06-28 | Barbara | Leave a comment

If you haven’t visited our store in a while, you may have missed our new addition: the Lighthouse Swarm bundle!

We’ve been working for some time now on improving the Lighthouse decks and its positioning system. Earlier in the year, we have brought the Lighthouse deck out of early access. While working with it, we have seen the great possibilities and the accuracy of this new positioning system. Thanks to Steam’s VR base station that we use as an optical beacon, the Crazyflie calculates its position with an accuracy better than a decimeter and millimeter precision. It gives a tracking volume of up to 5x5x2 meters with sub-millimetre jitter and below 10 cm accuracy while flying. It’s perfect for a swarm, as it’s accurate, precise and autonomous. We’ve flown our Crazyflies with it a number of time and seen some awesome stuff with it!

As an example, here is a demo we’ve shown on a conference back in October. We’ve used 8 Crazyflies equipped with Lighthouse decks and Qi chargers, to make a spiraling swarm. A computer orchestrates the Crazyflies and make sure one is flying at all times, while the others re-charge their batteries on their pads. After a pre-programmed trajectory is finished or when the battery of the flying Crazyflie is depleted, it goes back to its pad while another one takes over. The demo had an all-in mode that runs the trajectory on all Crazyflie with sufficient charge at once, the result is quite impressive and demonstrate the great relative precision of the Lighthouse system:

After the launch signal is sent to the Crazyflies, the computer is not required anymore: the Crazyflie will autonomously estimate its position from the lighthouse’s signals. The Crazyflie can estimate its own X, Y and Z in a global coordinate system.

What’s great with the Lighthouse Swarm is that it allows you to do drone research even if you’re on a tighter budget.

And when we got the opportunity to acquire our own base stations (that are also available in the shop by the way), it seemed only logical to offer a Swarm bundle similar to our Loco swarm bundle. So what’s in it ?

While the positioning will work with one base station, two base stations will allow better coverage of the flight space and better stability; as Kimberly can attest, it’s even possible to set it in your kitchen. The Crazyradios allow communication between the Crazyflies and your computer.

We dedicated a lot of time to the Lighthouse this winter, writing a paper with the help of Wolgangs’ calibration expertise. In this paper, we compared both Lighthouse V1 and V2 with the MoCap system. In all cases, the mean and median Euclidean error of the Lighthouse positioning system are about 2-4 centimeters compared to our MoCap system as ground truth. You can check the paper here, but here is a brief summary we used for our ICRA workshop:

We are now quite excited to get to see what you will do with this exciting new swarm bundle !

And if you don’t know how to set up the Swarm, you can get started at least with your Lighthouse system in this tutorial or watch Kristoffer explain it in this video:

Goodbye, 2020!

2020-12-28 | Barbara | Leave a comment

2020 was not an ordinary year, and through its different roller coaster motions, we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished. As 2021 grows nearer, it’s time to look back at this year and appreciate our accomplishments.

Community

The Crazyflie is still gaining a lot of interests in universities, and we’re always happy to discover what awesome things our users are doing with our products. One of our proudest moment was that a paper published in Science magazine used a Crazyflie in their research framework!

We actually made a montage of the different research videos where the Crazyflie, and we feel blessed to be part of those amazing feats. We were also quite surprised to see how the Crazyflie is implemented in different fields. Here is the video if you want to know more:

We’ve had stellar blogposts from guests this year, that you can read if you missed:

Of course, “community” this year means something different. We were sorry to not participate in the conventions and fairs where we usually meet a lot of interesting people, and had to find ways to do things differently. We now have a Discord server where people can join and discuss all things Bitcraze related!

Hardware

In the beginning of the year, we started right by releasing the Active Marker deck. Thanks to our collaboration with Qualisys, this new motion capture sensor can estimate the full body pose of the Crazyflie without unique marker positions or known starting positions.

A great deal of work was dedicated to the release of the AI deck in early access. Thanks to our newest deck, super-edge-computing is now possible on your Crazyflie !

Software

We improved our app API. We have seen it used more and more. Being able to add code to the Crazyflie without having to fork the code has proven to be quite useful and popular.

At the beginning of the year we finally managed to decode and use the Lighthouse V2 signals in order to get the Crazyflie to fly autonomously using lighthouse V2 basestations. Our focus for the end of year was to improve the Lighthouse V2, and thanks to some hard work, we managed to improve the calibration compensation for the newest version of Valve’s base station.

The client got a new facelift, as well as the python lib, and we released no less than 4 different new releases.

Documentation

We tried as much as we can to improve our documentation, and working from home proved how much it is needed. Kimberly wrote some step-by-step guides that help you discover more hands-on how to use our python library and the motion commander.

We also tried a new way to connect with you, while improving our existing tutorials, by having an online tutorial. It proved quite successful and it was a great way to talk about all the possibilities (and difficulties!) of a swarm.

The way we work

The biggest change was, as many of you, to learn to work from home. We managed quite well, learning to adapt our process. We now are experts in flying at home, and even though our flying arena is deserted, our kitchens are now more alive than ever.

I came in the company too, offloading the administration work, and we welcomed for some time our intern.