Lets meet at Maker Faire Berlin!

2016-09-26 | Björn Mauritz | 1 Comment

The Maker Faire Berlin is coming up and we are starting to get ready for showtime!

The last couple of weeks has been really busy getting ready for the Maker Faire Berlin. The plan is to show multiple Crazyflies flying autonomously enabled by the Loco positioning system. To spice up the experience of autonomous flight and to inspire the visitors to imagine future applications we have made a small light and sound show where the Crazyflie is dancing to a soundtrack Kristoffer made.

Here is a teaser where we are maybe stretching the limits a bit too far ;-):

Taking the opportunity to exhibit what we do at events like the Maker Faire Berlin is really exciting and we are looking forward to hanging out with cool people and getting feedback about what we do.

So come and visit us at Maker Faire Berlin is Sept 30 to Oct 2 at Station Berlin. You will find us in hall 3, stand 149.

See you there!

Getting started with Loco positioning

2016-06-20 | Björn Mauritz | 2 Comments

We are right now eagerly awaiting the first batch of the Loco positioning system to be done and ready for shipping. The interest for the early access release has been very encouraging and we are super happy about the attention we have received from all around the world.

We have made a new video about how to get started with the Loco positioning system that we hope you will enjoy. The video is showing the process from receiving the Loco Positioning system up to having an autonomous flying Crazyflie. The written information can be found on the wiki.

Visiting Chalmers

2016-05-09 | Björn Mauritz | Leave a comment

Two weeks ago we had the opportunity to make a field trip to Gothenburg (Sweden) where we visited the students and teachers at Chalmers University of Technology.

The Crazyflie 2.0 is used by the students as a development platform for the course “Embedded control systems“, which makes us all very happy since we are passionate about education. I mean how cool is it not to see how students use your product to gain new knowledge!

While visiting Kristoffer held a guest lecture to the students and we also took the opportunity to discuss with Associate Professor Knut Åkesson about why and how the Crazyflie 2.0 is part of the course.

A few of the topics that were mentioned was the big benefit with Crazyflie 2.0 being open and how that enabled the students to easily getting started implementing their own code.

If you want to read more about why the teachers at Chalmers choosed the Crazyflie 2.0 and how they use it for education, visit our newly added web section “Used in education”.

New projects on hackster.io

2016-04-04 | Björn Mauritz | 4 Comments

Last week we had some great contributions at our hackster.io platform page that you really should check out.

The first project is made by our good friend Fred that created a tutorial about how to do a FPV setup inspired by this video from LaDroneShop.

The second really cool project was made by Jim that have experimented with making “long exposure light paintings” using Crazyflie 2.0 and the LED-ring deck.

We are always very excited to see how people are using our Crazyflie, what is especially inspiring for us is to see that the diversity between the different usage areas is so great.

Finally please don’t hesitate to share you projects with us, we are more than happy to post them on our blog or promote them on our hackster.io page.

Perching at Stanford using the Bitcraze Crazyflie

2016-03-21 | Björn Mauritz | 5 Comments

Last week we where happy to learn that engineers at Stanford’s Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Lab have been using the Crazyflie 2.0 as a prototyping tool when creating the robot SCAMP – Stanford Climbing and Aerial Maneuvering Platform.

This very impressing work centers around the ability for a drone to actually land on vertical surfaces. In addition to this the robot climb along that surface. Read more here and here. Really cool!

One of the future usages the researchers mention is to help out in the rescue work after earthquakes and other catastrophes. We are so proud that our drone is used in this research field!

New front page and Fosdem

2016-02-01 | Björn Mauritz | 2 Comments

So as usual at Bitcraze it’s been a busy week. We have made a complete makeover of the front page of our website. The main goal has been to communicate what Bitcraze and the Crazyflie is about, in an engaging way to our visitors. We have added sections where we try to explain common use cases for the Crazyfile and all the exciting areas it is used in. We have also added a “used by” section where we want to collect all the cool organisations that use the Crazyflie. Since we made the site open, send us a pull request if your organisation is missing or if you find anything else that you think should be improved. By the way, we got the first pull request for the site the other day :-) Awesome! Finally we have updated the team member page, so now you can see what we look like and what we do.

We hope you like it! We love feedback, please share your thoughts.

Aside from being busy at the office we’ve also had a busy (and awesome) weekend at FOSDEM! When we go to conferences we normally try to either talk or exhibit something. But for FOSDEM we just wanted to take it easy and meet people, have interesting conversions and listen great talks. We had a great time and we’re definitely coming back next year. We were especially excited to catch Fred’s lightningtalk on the Crazyflie 2.0 and AdaCore’s talk on re-implementing the Crazyflie 2.0 firmware using SPARK and Ravenscar. The videos from the talks still aren’t available, but when they are we’ll make sure to let you know. Below are some images from our weekend at FOSDEM.

: Opening at FOSDEM

: Fred’s lightningtalk on Crazyflie 2.0

: AdaCore on re-implementing Crazyflie 2.0 firmware with SPARK

: Olimex on KiCad

: Setting up RTLS for an unofficial demo

: Lots of Mini Ultimakers

: An open laptop

At last Fred published the slides for his talk:

Crazyflie 2.0 FOSDEM 2016 from fredg15

“Getting started” with Christmas

2015-12-21 | Björn Mauritz | 2 Comments

If you are one of the lucky ones getting a Crazyflie for Christmas we are happy to tell you there is a new and fresh “getting started” guide to help you get going :-).

Before going on holiday me and Kristoffer published an updated version for the “getting started” part of the website which we are very happy about. Besides making a new edition of the “Assembling” part we have also added “Installing on a smartphone”, “Installing on a computer” and “Flying”.

We are hoping that these new additions for the “Getting started” section will be a big help for everybody who just got a Crazyflie for Christmas and feel unsure about how to start. Also this is an additional way to help people finding out if the Crazyflie is right for them, who otherwise might feel uncertain about buying one or not.

If you have any comments or suggestions about the new “Getting started” please feel free to contribute we are always open to ideas about improvements and tweaks.

It’s been a hectic time here att Bitcraze before Christmas with new decks coming out and the ongoing re-design of the website among others. So we are all taking some time off during the holidays but we will be answering email and support issues. However it might take a bit longer time since we will be occupied with drinking swedish glögg, french wine and stuffing ourselves with chocolate.

New website in progress

2015-11-30 | Björn Mauritz | 2 Comments

Some of you might have noticed that the website is getting a make-over which we are very happy about. Me and Kristoffer have teamed-up and first and foremost replaced the old wordpress theme with an new bootstrap-based theme. Choosing a new theme can be quite a hassle since there is literally a jungle of themes out there.

So we finally settled for a simple theme that was easily modifiable and decided to basically strip it and starting to create our own design. So while I’ve been doing wireframes for the next version of the website, Kristoffer have been turning bootstrap inside out and started to make the old content responsive.

We have also modified the architecture of the websites content and started to clean up all the different pages. When discussing the new website we have talked a lot about how to make the site more engaging and how to better meet our users’ needs, which have been super fun but is also a complex task. One of our ideas which we are in the middle of evolving is to create what we call “gates”. The gates will be pages based on different users needs and contain material and guidance we think the user will benefit from the most, as an example maybe one gate will be named “research” or something similar and be especially tailored for scientists and researchers. That’s it for now, if you want please leave a comment about what you think of the design so far, or if you have any ideas regarding the “gates”.

Information architecture-workshop for the new website :-).