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“Getting started” with Christmas

  2015-12-21  |     |    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.

mondayPost

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.

postCard2

New decks heading into production

  2015-12-14  |     |    2 Comments

After a hectic week we’re finally ready to put some new decks into production! A couple of months ago we selected 4 deck prototypes to try to bring to production before Christmas: WiFi, GPS, BigQuad and the Buzzer. After working hard on them during the last months, we’re now ready to release the Buzzer and BigQuad decks. Last week we ordered the first batches and the product pages and descriptions are being written this week. We’ll push out more information about the boards as it gets available, so stay tuned!

Below is a few quick shots of the latest prototypes:

So what happened to the GPS and the WiFi decks? The latest prototypes are working, but there’s still some minor issues. So instead of moving to production with the current design, we’re doing one last prototype iteration and launching the boards early next year.

On a related note we’ve been working hard together with Seeedstudio to get some more Crazyflie 2.0s into stock before Christmas. Not so surprisingly we’re not the only ones rushing to produce. But thanks to lots of efforts from Seeedstudios side the Crazyflie 2.0 will be back in stock in a couple of days!

Battery issues and Crazyflie 2.0 out of stock

  2015-12-07  |     |    3 Comments

cf2 front rosetteIt’s that time of year again, time for Christmas shopping. This year we thought that we would plan ahead and produce more units before Christmas to meet the demand. It was a great plan, but there were some hick-ups on the way. Originally the plan was that a fresh batch of Crazyflie 2.0’s would be rolling out of production right around now and being available in the Seeedstudio bazaar. But unfortunately we’ve only managed to get a small part of the batch out. And since demand is high before Christmas they were all sold out immediately. But we’re working hard to get the remaining part of the batch ready. The new time-plan is for the units to be finished around Christmas, which means they might not have time to ship to customers and be ready to get unwrapped by happy geeks around the world. But there’s still a chance to get a great present for your fellow geek (or maybe your own inner geek), check out our list of local distributors.

On another note we’re having some issues with shipment of spare batteries from China. New shipping and customs regulations have made it very expensive to ship spare batteries that are not included in products. Normally several orders of products are bundled together when doing the shipping/customs from Seeedstudio, but each battery now has to be handled separately with it’s own declaration and paperwork .We’re trying to find a way around this issue, but until then the spare battery at Seeedstudio will be listed as out of stock. If anyone has any tips on how to solve the issue, please let us know.

New website in progress

  2015-11-30  |     |    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”.

MondayPost

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

The dashing dashboard

  2015-11-23  |     |    5 Comments

We have a dashboard (aka radiator) based on dashing in the office.

office2

The purpose of the dashboard is to drive the team focus and encourage us to work on the most important tasks at hand. For instance, we realized that we have been really bad at merging pull requests from the community (sorry about that!), and we wanted to improve. Our solution has been to add a widget to the dashboard that shows all pending pull requests, and now we have been handling pull requests much faster. Success! The visibility of data changed the behavior of the team.

Another problem that has emerged in the new office, is that the 3D printer is now in the basement. We used to have it in the office so monitoring the progress was easy, but now it is two flights of stairs away. We use a Raspberry Pi with the awesome OctoPrint as print server (through the OctoPi image) and since it supports integrated video, we installed a webcam over the printer and viola! Now we can see the progress in OctoPrint.

octoprint

Why not add it to the dashboard? Due to how our network is organised, the dashboard pulls in the data from the printer on client side as opposed to server side, but problem solved. The code is on github.

dashboard

46 minutes left on the 3D-print. No pull requests to handle!

Progress on Local positioning

  2015-11-16  |     |    Leave a comment

A we wrote before, we are working on a Ultra-Wide-Band-based local positioning system for the Crazyflie. We are doing slow progress but progress anyway and we wanted to do a small update on it.

We are at our second revision on the anchors, they are now based on an STM32F072 CPU which has the advantage to have an USB bootloader which will useful to update them on the field. We are trying to think about either or not we should implement more communication like Ethernet to the anchor. Our main use-case is to get the localisation in the Crazyflie but we are aware of use-case where the localisation is required on the ground instead. If you have any input on the design of Ultra-Wide-Band anchors please let us know.

We have also made a 3D printed support for attaching the anchors to the ceiling or ground:

stand

As for the localisation, we are able to range from the copter to the anchors and we are logging the range using the Crazyflie 2.0 log subsystem. We have tested logging data in a csv file and running a Particle filter to find the copter position, more about the filter in a future post.  So far it looks good but we need a nicer way to visualize the data. The way we are taking is to learn and use ROS.

ROS is a system used by researcher in robotics and it implements a lot of things like visualization and state of the art algorithm. Wolfgang from USC has written a ROS driver for Crazyflie and it is about time we are getting into ROS. It is a learning process for us but the plan is to implement and test the UWB local positioning system on top of ROS, which will allow us to use its components and reduce development time.

Server down time

  2015-11-16  |     |    Leave a comment

On Thursday 2015-11-12 our web-servers were down for a few hours. Some unexpected updates in our hosing service made our storage solution stop. Unfortunately we had to restore our data from the latest backups to get the system back up and therefore lost all “new” data between 2:00 and 16:00 CET 2015-11-12. The services that were affected are the forum, the blog and the wiki. Any posts, new accounts or other user data that has been added during that period were lost. If your post/account/comment is lost, please add it again.

We are sorry about this and are working on finding a solution to avoid this in the future.

New Decks comming soon

  2015-11-09  |     |    3 Comments

Lately we have been busy finalizing new Decks. We have a pretty long list of what we want to release and the first four to come are the bigquad deck, the Buzzer deck, Wifi (ESP8266) deck and a GPS (GlobalTop) deck. Before going further a disclaimer: we have ordered final prototype of these decks so the probability we release them is pretty high, though it is still possible we end up hitting a big bug and then some might be delayed.

The bigquad  was covered in previous post. It is a very simple deck: only connectors. It can be used to connect brushless motors ESCs to the Crazyflie in order to control a bigger quad. We have also added connectors to control the Crazyflie from a standard receiver (SPPM input), for GPS, active buzzer, battery telemetry and I2C sensors. The main use case we see for this deck is to be able to develop with the Crazyflie and then go outside and fly with bigger sensors without having to port the code to another platform.

bigquaddeck

Firmware-wise we are developing support for ESCs and SPPM input.

The Buzzer deck is the second simplest: we have ‘just’ mounted a buzzer on a deck and made the driver for it. As usual with production nothing is easy and selecting the buzzer was surprisingly hard. We wanted a low profile buzzer to be able to put other decks on top of it. We have ordered 20-ish different buzzer from DigiKey and tested all of them to select the best:

BuzzerSelect_w

buzzerdeck

The Buzzer driver will be able to play some music as well other sounds. One use case we envision for the buzzer deck is to be able to find the Crazyflie if it has crashed out of sight.

The GPS deck is an old story: we started working on a GPS deck on the Summer 2014 and we even planed to release it at the same time as the Crazyflie 2.0. Unfortunately we had lots of problems with the antenna not working properly when attached to the Crazyflie. After a lot of experimentation, spread over 1 year, we finally endeded up with a design that works: an integrated GPS receiver and patch antenna:

gpsdeck

We found the patch antenna to be much less sensitive to the Crazyflie 2.0 ground plane than the previously tested chip-antenna. As for the software part we will implement enough code to decode the NMEA strings from the GPS and makes them available via the log subsystem. We have a prototype of a new GPS tab in the client using a webview and openstreetmap, more on that on a later post.

Finally we have mounted an ESP8266 wifi module on a deck and Crazyflie 2.0 becomes Wifi enabled :-):

wifideck

So far we are planning on loading the NodeMCU Lua firmware in the ESP8266 which will allow to easily develop wifi connectivity to the Crazyflie. Note that the final board will be based on a different ESP8266 module with chip-antenna.

We will post more in-depth information about those new decks in the following weeks. We will also communicate the release date as soon as we know it.

Team pomodoro

  2015-11-06  |     |    Leave a comment

We are experimenting with pomodoro inspired techniques (http://pomodorotechnique.com/) in the team. What we do is that we are doing team pomodoros where we work focused for 25 minutes, without communicating. During the work periods we record all questions and so on that we need to ask, and after the period we communicate and resolve all issues that came up. We don’t do pomodoros all the time, but only when we feel that it is useful. Some days we might do a lot of them and other days none.

What we find interesting is that it has turned out that the important feature is not about NOT communicating during the work periods, but that the communication becomes more focused when we do communicate.

We have added a countdown timer widget to our dashboard to make it really easy to start by anyone.

pomodoro2 pomodoro
The timer is also handy for all sort of time-boxed activities in the team.

The code for the widget is available at https://gist.github.com/krichardsson/a2c8ad556caa643f822c