In the Happy holidays video this year we are using the upcoming Lighthouse deck for positioning, the plan is that the Lighthouse deck will be available in our store the first quarter next year.
We hope you enjoy the video :-)!
A few weeks ago we wrote about the release of the Multi-ranging deck and the new STEM ranging bundle.
The STEM ranging bundle is a great addition in the classroom for a wide range of students. By combining the Flow deck v2’s time-of-flight distance sensor and optical flow sensor with the Multi-ranger deck’s ability to measure distance to objects, the Crazyflie gets position and spatial awareness.
We have shot a video that shows the bundle in action!
To get started with the STEM ranging bundle we have created a guide for the bundle with step-by-step instructions. The code for the demos in the video are available in the example directory of the crazyflie-lib-python project:
We love feedback so please leave some comments in the field below!
Returning visitors of our website might have noticed that we recently released a new and fresh design of our website’s front page.
The goal has been to make a front page that better reflects Bitcraze and what we do, so together with the updated design and new cool images (credit to USC) we have also added two new sections to the front page. First off we have extended the blog post section to show the three latest blog posts instead of just the latest one. Different users have different interests so by showing a bit wider range of blog topics the hope is that even more people will discover our blog and start following it. Our blog is a big part of how we communicate to the outer world so by adding a whole new section for the blog giving it more room on the front page feels exciting.
The testimonials section is the second part that we have added to the new front page. Here we are finally taking the opportunity to show some of the amazing work our community members have been doing using our Crazyflie. Each testimonial consist of a guest blog post that people from our community have contributed. It is pretty cool to show how researchers around the world are basing their projects on our products. If it’s by adding wheels to the drone or making LED lit swarms we are always happy to promote and show how the community are using our Crazyflie.
Our website is under constant improvement and the grand master plan for the near future is to update the content and design of the different portals and clean up the website in general. If you have any suggestions on what kind of content you would like to see in the portals or otherwise please send us feedback. As I mentioned in the beginning of the blog post, the new beautiful open shutter swarming photos we use on the front page is contributed to us by the researchers at USC. If you have any cool photos of the Crazyflie we would be more than happy to use them.
Last week while Kristoffer and Arnaud was in Singapore showcasing our Loco positioning system and Crazyflie at ICRA we initiated moving to a new bigger room here at The Ground. The Ground is a great business collective hosting offices for companies such as Mapilary, Monix, Castle to name a few. It is a very inspirational place to be with a great sharing climate which helps a lot for startups and early phase companies and we are happy to be part of it.
One of the nice things with the new office is that we now can have a dedicated flying area close buy and don’t have to run up and down the basement all the time. Hopefully this will help us speed up development and testing a bit, benefiting not just us, but the whole community :-).
So next time you get an email or forum post written from us you know where it is likely to have been typed.
We have been working with our indoor positioning system for over a year now and during that time the interest for the Loco positioning system have continuously been growing. Universities all over the world are already using our system and the attention we have received have been very encouraging. But the system has been a bit hard to set up and lacking in documentation. So we decided that this had to be fixed before we could leave early access.
So now we’re happy to announce that the Loco positioning system has reached a state where it’s out of “Early access” and we’re excited to see even more customers starting to use the system. We would like to thank everybody in the community that has been contributing to the project, this is what makes open source great!
Below are some of the steps we’ve taken to make it easier to use.
We have created a brand new “Getting started with Loco positioning” tutorial that will replace the old “Getting started” video that we made. The tutorial contains a step-by-step guide for flying one Crazyflie 2.0 autonomously using two way ranging. The more advanced features such as TDoA is still considered as experimental and won’t be covered in this tutorial. We are very happy with the outcome of this tutorial but please help us out and try the tutorial and give us feedback.
In order to easily configure and upgrade the firmware for the Loco positioning nodes we’ve created the LPS tool. With it you can set the address of the node, the mode and also upgrade the firmware easily.
Up until lately there hasn’t been any support for the Loco positioning system in our Crazyflie Python client, instead we’ve been using ROS. It’s a great tool and very powerful tool, but ROS can be a bit complicated with specific requirements on the environment in which it runs. So we wanted to be able to perform basic use-cases directly in our client, like setting up the system, debugging it and flying with it. In order to achieve this we created the Loco positioning tab and a new flight mode called Position hold.
The Loco positioning tab is used to set-up the system and view it’s status. You can configure the position of the anchors, easily see which anchors you’re close to and if all the anchors are responding as they should. It’s also possible to see the layout of the system and the Crazyflies position in it.
For flying the Crazyflie we’ve added the Position hold mode. When enabled this will translate gamepad input into velocity control set-points that are followed using the positioning.
We’ve added technical documentation for the Loco positioning system to the wiki and we’ve also created product pages with schematics and details on the hardware for the Loco positioning node and deck. In the documentation you can find useful things like protocol documentation and details on our reference set-up that we use in our lab. Sine the system is still continuously evolving this is a working document that will continue to be improved over time and we hope to push the boundaries further for swarm flying and robotics in general.
Finally a reminder, if your are attending 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Singapore you can meet us in booth C08 from 30/5 – 01/6. We will show autonomous flight with the Crazyflie 2.0 enabled by the the Loco Positioning System. Come by have a chat with us and see the Loco positioning in action!
You will also be able to attend the presentation of the paper “Crazyswarm: A Large Nano-Quadcopter Swarm” by researchers from USC during Wednesday 31/5 at 11:15.
To support the features mentioned above we’ve released version 2017.05 of the Crazyflie Python client and Crazyflie firmware.
Seeedstudio has been our main distributor and manufacturer since we started and they have also acted as our main sales channel. A couple of years ago we started to discuss setting up our own E-shop and finally last year we decided to try our own wings. We wanted to start small and treated the E-shop as an experiment, since we are newbies at e-commerce and are learning as we are going. The E-shop has been up and running for almost 10 month now without really being official, but now we have decided to go all in!
We have definitely experienced different ups and downs this last 10 months but overall it has been a positive experience. Handling the logistics and balancing stock between different warehouses have been a challenge but in return we can now communicate with and support our customers in a better way. We have been able to release hardware early to our community through our Early access program, which has been very exciting and also given us a lot of useful feedback. We have also been able to continuously improve the overall user experience by for instance creating bundles and better information architecture.
Check our store out at https://store.bitcraze.io/ and let us know what you think! We are always trying to improve and all feedback is welcome.
Remember we still have all our great local distributors, if you prefer to buy locally please check out our distributor list.
Lately the Crazyflie has been used more and more as a demonstration and reference platform by a number of sensor manufacturers, including Bosch Sensortec. The possibility to add expansion decks to the platform and that the project is open source makes the Crazyflie very suitable to test and demonstrate new sensors in real time. For us this is a further confirmation of the strengths of working with open source and it enables us to provide the community with new and cool expansion decks as early as possible.
We are glad that the industry sees the value in our open source project and is interested in collaborating with us. This will enable us to continue to evolve this and other exiting new hardware project in the future. If you and your company is interested in a collaboration, please read more on our “Used by the industry” section.
During the fall of 2016 fashion designer Maartje Dijkstra have in collaboration with music producer Beorn Lebenstedt (Newk) and engineer Erik Overmeire been working with the creation “TranSwarm Entities”, a dress made out of 3D prints accompanied by autonomously flying Crazyflies. The project was made during the Fashion Fusion Lab, a three-month workshop in which selected teams got to work on their fashion concepts. Maartje and her team used our Loco positioning system to enable 4 Crazyflies to do a “dance” around the dress during the show.
Copyright Fashion Fusion
Here is how Maartje describes the creation:
“The sculptural high fashion dress is totally build up out of small fragments (bird skulls), like cells building an organism.The parts are manual 3D printed and after printing all connected together by hand with polyester wires and green leather. The technology part is integrated in a special way. 4 small drones, that have given the same black 3D printed appearance as the dress, fly up from places inside so it looks like parts of the dress are flying away.The drones fly on the beats and melodies of music producer Newk around the model creating a little swarm. The shoes are digital 3D printed but finished manually.”
The finalists from the Fashion Fusion Lab got to compete during the Berlin Fashion Week at the “Fashion Fusion Challenge” and we are happy to announce that Maartje together with her team got the third place!
We at Bitcraze are very happy for Maartje and her team and think it’s very exciting to see the Crazyflie 2.0 and the Loco positioning system being used in such a different context. It shows again the potential for future applications and how versatile the Crazyflie and the Loco positioning system is.
Here is a video showing the dress:
During the year it have become apparent that a new company logo was needed. The reason for this has been that the we didn’t really have a unified agreement over exactly what logo to use. Different versions of the old logo or just the company name appears here and there which in the end becomes very fragmented to say the least. So instead of just deciding on what version to use we took the opportunity to start fresh and create a new Bitcraze logo.
Even though a logo can come in all colors and shapes or maybe just being a font or the company initials, it is important to understand that it is only one part of the company brand puzzle. The logo isn’t made to increase sales, win design awards or to get more customers, it is solely an identifier. Of course a nice side-effect could be increased sales but the purpose when creating a new logo should be to reflect the brand not to increase business. In stating that a logo is just an identifier doesn’t mean that it is unimportant or pointless to put any thought into the design process, on the contrary the branding of a company together with things like having clear company values are part of the core communication with the outside world.
Creating a logo is a tricky task, the alternatives are literally infinite and the final decision of the new logo had to be something everybody in the team agrees and fell comfortable with. There is some basic consideration however that has been part of the discussion from the initial meeting. During the research phase I learned a few ground rules, I’m not sure they tell the whole story and there is certainly more considerations and angles to what makes a good logo, but I think in general they have worked as good guidance along the way. To illustrate these guidelines better I have used some examples from different more or less famous companies:
Keeping it simple has been a key aspect in the process of creating a new logo. Above is a great example of how to use a simple shape in combination with a distinct color and a specific typeface to create a logo.
Besides a very clever way to incorporate a symbol in the company name the shape of an arrow (between the “E” and the “x”) also tells something about the company, that FedEx is on the “move”.
Phones, tablets, smartwatches or t-shirts it doesn’t matter the logo should be made so that it works anywhere. This often means that the logo can’t have to many details or be to complex.
If you are looking at creating a logo that last over time, it is important to design something that is independent of trends or a specific event. It all comes down to the context of why you are making the logo.
Just because you are selling coffee doesn’t mean that your logo should be a coffee cup, look at Starbucks they have a mermaid/siren as a logo. Using something that isn’t obvious can create interest and recognizability since it stands out among others.
There is two ways for a logo to be memorable, it can either be very simple and easy to remember or it can be engaging by making an impression of some sort.
Sticking to one strong feature keeps a logo clear and distinct. This has been a very important guideline during the process of making a new logo for Bitcraze, only keeping to one idea.
The design process have consisted of recurring workshops and iterations where different alternatives and suggestions have been weighed against each other. A great design tool during this time has been Mood boards, visually illustrating an idea using collages is a very effective way to explain the background or inspiration to a design concept. Without going to much into detail about the whole process here is the Mood board that later evolved into the final design.
So here it is the new logo :-).
The inspiration, as you can see comes from the vias on a PCB. The core concept here is the love for development and being a hardware company making bleeding edge technology. An obvious choice would have been making something connected to flying and drones but since Bitcraze is more then just a drone company we chose another path.
We did however keep “Quantico”, the techy looking font that we have been using as it creates a nice contrast to the new logo. We have also been discussing different ideas of how to incorporate the logo onto our PCB:s, it would be kind of cool to have an actual via going through the logo right :-)?
It feels super exciting and a bit relieving that we managed to boil it down to a final design that we really like, and we hope that our community will like it as well.
So please write a comment and tell us what you think!
We have been discussing the information architecture on the Bitcraze forum after getting some really good feedback from Fred (derf) one of our forum members. Before starting to make changes to the forum we thought it would be a good idea to take the opportunity and ask all of our forum members for feedback about how the forum is structured. The forum should be easy to navigate and comprehensible for both new and old members so feedback from people actually using our forum is very valuable. So if you have any suggestions post a comment to this post or send us an email.
Also this week on Thursday 10/11-16 we are going to the developer conference Öredev that is taking place here in Malmö. We are exhibiting the same demo as we did at Maker Faire Berlin so if you are going to the conference expect to see an autonomously flying Crazyflie 2.0 enabled by our Loco positioning system (code and doc for demo published here). We are there the whole day so come by and have a chat :-).
We released a maintenance release of the Crazyflie 2.0 firmware last week. The new release improves the stand-by time for the Crazyflie 2.0 and doesn’t effect the Crazyflie 1.0. The release can be found here.
We’ve started working towards positioning using TDoA and last week we pushed updates to both the Loco positioning node and to the Crazyflie 2.0 firmware. The changes are still largely untested but we’ll be continuing the work during this week. We’re really excited about the possibilities this brings, virtually unlimited number of Crazyflie 2.0s being positioned at the same time!