VL53L0x expansion deck

2016-12-05 | Marcus | 4 Comments

Most of the time we have a few prototypes lying around that we’re working more or less on. Sometimes some of these make it into a product if we feel that they might be useful or fun for the community, like for instance the SD-card. Now it’s time for another prototype to be moved to manufacturing, a deck with VL53L0x laser ToF distance sensor.

On the Crazyflie 2.0 (and Crazyflie 1.0 10-DOF) we have a pressure sensor mounted to help control the altitude of the platform. Since air pressure is moving around a lot and the measurement is noisy it’s been very hard to get a rock-solid altitude hold working (although it’s getting closer). Already back when ST released the VL6180X we were looking at it, but the range was too short (10cm max). So when ST released the VL53L0x which has longer range (200cm max) we though this might be a good deck for the Crazyflie 2.0.

So we have a working prototype and thanks to stephanbro and Marcus Grieff we also have the firmware to use it with the Kalman filter. We are currently working at making it work together with the pressure sensor with the current altitude-hold mode.

Currently we’re working on verifying the hardware to make sure the power supply is good enough for it, but then the next step is production. Hopefully it will be available in a couple of months :-) Below is a picture of the current prototype.

VL53

First Crazyflie swarm flying with TDoA in Loco Positioning Sytem

2016-11-28 | Arnaud | 2 Comments

Last week we reached a milestone for our Loco Positioning System: we got 5 Crazyflie 2.0 to fly in a swarm with Time Difference of Arrival measurements. This is a great step closer to making the LPS leave the early-access state.

Until now, positioning has been done using a method called Two Way Ranging (TWR). The advantage of TWR ranging is that it allows us to easily get ranges to the anchors by actively pinging them in sequence. Based on these ranges we can then calculate the current Crazyflie position and control the Crazyflie to move to a wanted position. The big drawback though is that since each Crazyflie has to actively transmit packets to ping anchors, flying many Crazyflie means sharing the air and so the more we want to fly the less ranging each Crazyflie can do. In other words: it does not scale.

TDoA measurement consist of measuring the difference of flight time between packets coming from different anchors and this is harder to achieve since the anchor clocks must be synchronized to each other. The killer feature of TDoA is that it can be implemented using unidirectional packet sent from the anchor system and received by the tag/Crazyflie. It means that as soon as you get one Crazyflie flying with TDoA, you can get as many as you want since the Crazyflies do not have to transmit anything.

This is what happened last week: on Thursday evening we got 1 Crazyflie to fly with TDoA measurements. On Friday we tried 3 and then 5 without much effort. It was just matter of modifying the ROS launchfile to connect more crazyflies, a copy-paste operation.

First #crazyflie #swarm flight with TDoA and #locopositioning. Friday fun! pic.twitter.com/fRmbE9PfHU

— Bitcraze (@Bitcraze_se) November 25, 2016

Then

TDoA scales! Bigger #swarm. 5 #crazyflies with #locopositioning pic.twitter.com/nacgRGrucp

— Bitcraze (@Bitcraze_se) November 25, 2016

There still seems to be a margin for progression to get even more stable flight with TDoA and we are also working on making the LPS and Swarm work with our Python client which will make it easier to use outside a robotic lab.

If you want to try the (very experimental!) TDoA mode with your loco positioning system we have documented how to get it to work on the wiki.

Thanks a lot to the growing community that is supporting us and allow us to move faster towards a Crazyflie swarm.

Disrupted week

2016-11-21 | Kristoffer Richardsson | Leave a comment

Last week was interrupted, disrupted and generally chopped up as a few of us had to stay home fighting germs and viruses. Today all of us were present again and hopefully we will all be well this week to participate in the fun. Even though last week will not make it to the hall of fame when it comes to productivity we still made some progress.

TDoA mode of the Loco Positioning system

We are happy to announce that we have calculated the first TDoA (Time Difference of Arrival) based position in the Crazyflie. This might not sound very spectacular but it is one step closer to being able to position an infinite (in theory) number of Crazyflies simultaneously. We used test driven development (TDD) to implement the functionality and we think it helped us to manage the complexity and write better code. We have written a few unit tests earlier, but this is our first serious attempt at test driven pair programming. We have based the unit tests on Unity and mocking on CMock from Throw The Switch. The result of our efforts can be seen in lpsTdoaTag.c and TestLpsTdoaTag.c.

New Logo

We have used a few different variations of logos up to now, the historical logo was good for electronic boards (PCBs) but hard to make look good in other contexts like the webpage and so we ended up in a situation where we do not have a consistent logo for everything. We have decided that we probably should try to find one that we all like and want to use everywhere. Björn has made a bunch of different designs that we all have discussed together and after a few iterations we are converging towards something really good. We will not show any previews, just stay tuned to see the final result.

The logo currently used on Bitcraze PCBs

Marcus Greiff

We want to welcome Marcus to the team, he will work with algorithms one day a week. Marcus is currently studying at LTH where he has been using the Crazyflie 2.0 platform in his studies.

SD-card expansion deck in production

Production materials for the SD-card expansion deck has been sent to the factory. Hopefully it will be available in the shop in a few weeks time.

Spontaneous collaboration at Øredev

2016-11-14 | Kristoffer Richardsson | 2 Comments

We attended Øredev last week and showed off our demo with an autonomous Crazyflie with a light and sound show. It was the same demo as we had in Maker Faire Berlin earlier this autumn that we wrote about last week. It is noticeable how much better the system has become since Maker Faire Berlin when it comes to performance, the Crazyflie is almost completely static when hovering in one spot now and the motions are much more snappy and exact. Hats off to the community that contributed the improvements!

At Øredev we met Ray Arkaei, the DJ that played at the party in the evening. When he realized that we used MIDI to control the position of the Crazyflie and the color of the LED-ring, he immediately offered to create his own sequence to a bit more contemporary music. This is what we love with events like Øredev, we meet people and exciting (and unexpected) events take place! He plugged in his machines and we set the goal of making a short sequence, film it and upload it to facebook. After just 10-20 minutes of experimenting (and recap from our side of how we had implemented the demo) Ray got going and soon he had had a pretty cool sequence going!

We shot this video with a phone

Arkaei shot the sequence with his 4K camera (yes, we would love to have one too!) but unfortunately did not have time finish the editing. We are eagerly awaiting the final results and will publish a link here on the blog when it is live!

Thanks to Ray and Øredev for a memorable day!

Going to Öredev and updating the forum

2016-11-07 | Björn Mauritz | Leave a comment

Bitcraze forum

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.

Öredev

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 :-).

New Crazyflie 2.0 firmware release

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.

Progress on TDoA for Loco positioning

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!

Loco positioning system update: Kalman, controller and TDMA

2016-10-31 | Arnaud | 3 Comments

Loco positioning system is still in Early access which means that things are moving fast. Since the release of the loco positioning system a Kalman filter has been contributed by Mike Hammer at ETH Zurich. The Kalman filter allows to calculate the position estimate in the Crazyflie and merges the Loco positioning system information with internal sensor to generate a much better estimate. We also worked on improving the anchor firmware, it is now ranging faster and we fixed a bug that was making the anchor hang sometime. Finally stephanbro on github pushed an improved position controller that improved the stability of flight a lot.

Because of all these changes we have decided to make a new video and to rewrite the documentation on the wiki a bit. Enjoy!

On the development side, we have extended the Loco Positioning system to position 2 concurrent Tags by using TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) where each Tag is allocated a time slot to use to range to the anchors.

This works fine for a few Tags, but does not scale very well for a larger numbers of tags. If you want to experiment by yourself there is some instruction in the git commit. Be aware that this is still experimental enough for us to break it without warning so keep track of the git commits when you pull the latest version of the firmware. Currently we are working on a TDoA (Time Difference Of Arrival) mode that will scale to concurrently position virtually an infinite number of tags, hopefully you will soon be able to see commits on that on our Github projects.

Micro SD-card support

2016-10-24 | Kristoffer Richardsson | 3 Comments

The logging subsystem of the Crazyflie 2.0 is fairly flexible and easy to use, but despite its nice properties it may still be limiting in some scenarios. Two areas where it is lacking are offline- and high-speed logging. As a step towards solving these problems we are happy to announce support for micro SD-cards in the Crazyflie 2.0 firmware.

We have had a prototype for a micro SD-card expansion deck lying around in the office for a long time but have not had time to write any code for it. Finally we decided to go ahead an fix it and now there is a first basic version in the master branch of the firmware. What we have added so far is a driver for communicating with the deck and support for the FAT file system and that means that it is possible to read or write files to/from a SD-card. We have not yet implemented any means for configuring parameter logging to file but that is something we would like to do in the near future.

DIY

The hardware design for the expansion deck is very simple.

If you are eagerly waiting for this functionality it should not be too hard to create your own deck, otherwise we plan to release one sometime in the near future. We can not promise when, but if you need it please let us know as it might change our priorities when deciding what to do.

When the deck is installed all you have to do is build the firmware with

CFLAGS += -DDECK_FORCE=bcUSD

in the tools/make/config.mk file to enable the SD-card functionality and add your own code in src/deck/drivers/src/usddeck.c to read or write to your SD-card.

Controlling Crazyflie with the Specktr midi glove at Maker Faire Berlin 2016

2016-10-17 | Arnaud | Leave a comment

We have always been interested in controlling Crazyflie with various devices. For example we had the Leap Motion that enabled us to control the Crazyflie with our bare hand. Then we hacked a glove for Arduino day. At Maker faire Berlin 2016 we met the team from Specktr. Specktr is a midi glove and since our demo was controlled with midi we had to try connecting the Specktr with Crazyfile 2.0 flying using Loco Positioning System!

We met in the evening, after the faire was closed, and started hacking to map the midi messages transmitted by the glove to our midi to position ROS node. After a couple of mandatory crashes and crazy behavior (like setting the flight area way too big and sending the Crazyflie high speed away at the snap of a finger, too bad we have no video of that …) we had things working well and the glove could control the Crazyflie X position:

The second and last day of the faire we did a more proper connection where both X and Y could be controlled. The result is quite nice. It looks near magic, and quite fun, to control Crazyflie just by just moving the hand:

Speccktr is currently running a crowd funding campaign and we cannot wait to get ours to be able to hack more with it together with Crazyflie and Loco Positioning System.

Bitcraze demo at Maker Faire Berlin 2016

2016-10-10 | Arnaud | Leave a comment

One week ago we where presenting Crazyflie 2.0 and the Loco Positioning System at Maker Faire Berlin 2016. It was a lot of fun being there, we enjoyed it very much, and it also required a couple of weeks of preparation. The preparation was both mechanical and markerting: out booth was built with and outdoor tent frame and we featured the first roll-ups of Bitcraze history (almost felt a bit too ‘corporate’ for us :-).

On the technical side it was an opportunity to test Crazyflie and the Loco Positioning System in real event situation. This required stabilizing the system and testing it so that no bad surprises would happen during the faire. The result is pretty good: we flew more than 91% of the opening time, we had 2 fly-away the first day, fixed the problem and had none the second day. We were flying with 2 Crazyflie sequentially and had not broken any motor mount or other part during opening hours (some crazyness did happen after-hours though, maybe more on that on a later post ;-).

For our demo the Crazyflie was flying autonomously with the loco positioning system using the Kalman filter to fly towards a given x/y/z set-point. We made a midi-to-crazyflie bridge in ROS that allowed to give control of the Crazyflie position via a midi cable. We actually used a physical midi cable which was the safest and simplest. On the other side of the midi cable was a computer running a midi sequencer, lmms. Part of the sequence was playing actual music to make the Crazyflie dance and part was just silent movement. The setup looked like that:

Midi can encode notes pitch (ie. where in the piano you play) and velocity (ie. how hard you press the piano key). The midi track contained 4 tracks: X, Y, Z and LED-ring. In X, Y, Z tracks the note pitch converted into a position and we don’t use the velocity. The led ring track maps the note pitch to a color and the velocity to a brightness. It looks like that:

This setup was a bit of a test, we found it to be very reliable. Some functionality were implemented on-site after Friday morning experience: automatic landing when the battery was low and reconnect on take-off to allow taking off without restarting anything in the PC just at a press of a button. The midi link worked well even though it feels a bit hackish to setup a choreography like that. If you have any better idea what to use to make a Crazyflie dance please tell us!

Last but not the least we have share all the codes, files and documentation for this demo on github so that you can run it yourself with an loco positioning system. We also made a short video showing the demo in action:

Crazyflie 2.0 tested in wind-tunnel at Maker Faire Berlin 2016

2016-10-03 | Arnaud | 1 Comment

We are just back from the Maker Faire Berlin where we have met lot of interesting people and shown the loco positioning system. We have calculated that Crazyflie 2.0 has flown for more than 91% of the faire thanks to the autonomous flight with Loco Positioning System.

Our neighbor at the Maker Faire was Gerhard Fließ from Deskbreeze and he was presenting a mini desktop wind-tunnel:

This was a great opportunity for us to test the Crazyflie in a wind-tunel. The result is really impressive slow motion videos:

The wind-tunnel is mainly designed for education. The wind goes at 1 m/s which is apparently too slow for aerodynamic study but nevertheless we can see some interesting effects. Then the propeller pulls the air, we can see the lines getting tighter just before the propeller, this is a sign of higher speed flow and lower pressure. The difference of pressure between the bottom and the top of the propeller is what makes the Crazyflie fly. When the Crazyflie pushes the airflow, simulating a descent, we can see an oscillation of the air flow. This is most likely what can cause instability when descending fast.

We will post more about the Maker Faire Berlin and our autonomous flight demo in the following weeks so stay tuned. Thanks to all we have met, it is awesome to meet and talk about the Crazyflie in person. A mostly great thanks to Fredg (derf on the forum ;), that was there to help us during the whole week end.