Finally a 3D printer!

2013-09-09 | Marcus | 4 Comments

We have been in need of a 3D printer for a while now, in order to print parts designed by community members and also prototype new parts. After talking about it for ages we finally got around to buying an Ultimaker. For now we have mostly been playing around (printing various things found online) but our plan is also to make some models that users can print themselves. Let’s see if we run out of plastic before we get that far :-)

Below are some parts we printed. The Crazyradio cover designed by foosel and the frame designed by VGer.

Bitcraze turns two years

2013-09-02 | Marcus | Leave a comment

The past weekend marks the two year anniversary of Bitcraze, the company we founded to manufacture and make the Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter kit available. Even though there’s been a lot of hurdles along the way we finally made it all the way to our goal! It’s been a great year with lot’s of fun things happening like finally testing the pre-series, visiting Seeedstudio in Shenzhen, seeing our empty forum filling up with active users and most of all seeing what users are doing with their Crazyflies. Thanks for supporting us!

Our first year with Bitcraze was spent doing lots of development, design, testing and sourcing. This year has been spent on lot’s of planning, administration, support and preparing for a release. We have said this a few times before, but it’s worth saying again: The easy part was getting the Crazyflie to fly, the hard part was manufacturing and releasing it. Having a company, website and production takes a lot of time. We are really happy with our co-operation with Seeedstudio, without them taking care of production/orders/sourcing/etc. we wouldn’t have had any time over for development.

One of the questions we were asking ourselves before Bitcraze was how our development would be affected when we suddenly had users using our hardware and software. Back then we basically did what ever we felt like doing, as long as it took us in the general direction of making things better. The client and firmware would suddenly be incompatible for a couple of weeks. If we needed to modify the hardware we just had 3 Crazyflies to patch. Sometimes we would just get fed up with everything and spend weeks doing other projects or going outside to smell the fresh air and get some sunshine. Having users and manufacturing a product changes things. It’s a great (and oddly bizarre) feeling seeing users assembling and using something that we have designed and worked on for so long. Even though we have spent years working with product development as contractors, we have never really seen or communicated with the end-users before. So in order to make this work we have spent lots of time discussing how to do things. That includes everything from naming conventions and work division, to how to organize the wiki and when to build new releases of our software. We once spent a whole night discussing how to name our products internally (like BC-CFK-04-A). Even though things are better now, there’s still room for lots of improvements.

So what’s the plan for the coming year? To get more development done! By now we have done most things for the first time, so hopefully the next time it won’t be as much work. Now that the summer is over and we have cleared our backlog of administrative tasks, we are hoping to get some momentum again. We will also try to find more fun things to do and to broaden the usage of the Crazyflie platform, like the Kinect and Leap Motion work, so that users can keep exploring and developing new things.

The image is actually the same image we posted last year when Bitcraze turned one. We are now one year older and wiser, which means we know better then to attach a lit candle to a LiPo battery and try to fly the quadcopter :-)

Community development

2013-08-26 | Tobias | Leave a comment

This Monday post we are devoting to the community development and we will try to give a short summary of what is going on there. We recently haven’t our selves had that much time to help out with this development, something we intend to change, so all credit goes to the community!

A port of the OpenPilot CC3D firmware to the Crazyflie done by webbn. Still under development but video already shows promising results.
Altitude hold functionality which is being developed in parallel by many, omwdunkley, phiamo, et. al. We hope we soon can contribute to this as well.
Improved thrust control which is being discussed a lot and hopefully we will soon see some ideas realized.
A Ruby cfclient written by hsanjuan.
The Android client with a lot of work from derf and sebastian.
The FPV implementation driven mainly by omwdunkley and SuperRoach. Omwdunkley has made an awesome HUD (Heads Up Display) which we hopefully sometime will see integrated into the cfclient. Check out the video!

We have probably forgotten some of the great development that has been going on recently and if that is the case please write a comment about it and we will update the post with it.

Autopilot using Kinect and a PC

2013-08-19 | Marcus | 9 Comments

For the last couple of years (!) we have been discussing on and off about automatically flying the Crazyflie from a PC using OpenCV and a camera. We did a try a while ago using a PS3 Eye camera that wasn’t very successful. One of the issues we were having was detecting the distance from the Crazyflie to the camera. Another issue was a lag of about 1 second which made it impossible to control the Crazyflie using the video as input. So last week this discussion came up again and we finally decided to buy a Xbox360 Kinect. The image resolution is higher than the PS3 Eye and of course it has the ability to detect the distance from the camera to the objects it’s seeing.

The goal was to create a proof-of-concept application that shows that it’s possible as well as providing a stub for anyone that’s interested in doing more development. The application uses the normal image as well as the depth image from the Kinect to estimate where the Crazyflie is. This can easily be done by attaching a small colored ball to the Crazyflie and using a white background for flying. The images are processed and the current X/Y/Z co-ordinates given to a control loop. The control loop consists of thee PID regulators that will correct the roll/pitch/thrust that is sent to the Crazyflie to reach a X/Y/Z set-point in the image. The X/Y set-point can be selected by clicking the image or you can hold down the mouse button and drag it around. A cool feature that we would like in the future is to draw a geometric shape that the Crazyflie could follow. But there’s still a lot of work to be done with the control loop before we can achieve that.

After seeing the video you might be asking yourself where the James Bond theme music or the inverted pendulum is. Well, we are’t quite there yet and we will probably not even get near it. But still, this shows that the concept works. And for anyone that’s interested, it’s possible to do some basic trajectory planning algorithms at home with a Crazyflie and a Kinect.

For a more technical details have a look at the Kinect page in the hacks section of the wiki.

Flying the Crazyflie with Leap Motion

2013-08-12 | Marcus | 4 Comments

The first time we saw the video for the Leap Motion we instantly thought “Wow, we have to fly the Crazyflie with this!”. So finally last week a fresh Leap Motion landed on our desk and we went to work. We were really happy to see that there was an SDK for Linux. Leap Motion listened to the community that thought that an early release of the code was better than nothing at all. The API is very nice to work with and you can easily get metrics for you hand (like elevation and roll/pitch). So we created a Leap Motion driver in the joystick layer that replaces the normal input device, and it’s flying! We are going to be honest, at first it wasn’t that fun. It was more the concept that was very exciting. But as we flew more and more it started getting really great! There’s just something magical about it :-)

You fly the Crazyflie using a single hand. Thrust is calculated using the elevation of you hand from the sensor, so holding your hand higher means larger thrust. Pitch/roll is controlled by tilting you hand the same way you want the Crazyflie platform to tilt. So tilting your hand forward tilts the Crazyflie forward. Lastly the yaw is controlled by rotating your hand in the X/Y plane (around the Z-axis). For thrust/pitch/roll the control values are absolute, but for yaw it’s the rate that you control (just like the normal controls in the Crazyflie client).

As a safety mechanism the Crazyflie will only respond if the Leap Motion detects 4 or more fingers. So holding your fist above the sensor does nothing, but the instant you open up your hand you can start to control the Crazyflie.

The code for flying with the Leap Motion is still on a development branch but if you are eager to try it then have a look at the instructions in the hacks section of the wiki for documentation on how to get flying! The plan is to merge the Leap Motion code into the main track once we are finished with the development.

Crazyflie distributors

2013-08-05 | Marcus | Leave a comment

We are now all back from vacation, restarting the work on Bitcraze stuff. We are looking forward to play with the Leap Motion we just received…

The development is still going forward. Among other things the Android client development has greatly improved lately and we are hopefully getting closer to the first official binary release. We are also thinking of releasing a new version of the client and firmware as some functionalities and bug fix has been implemented since the last version.

After the second batch was finished we made the Bitcraze products available to distributors through the Seeedstudio Warehouse. Now we are really excited to see that our products have started showing up in distributor webshops around the globe. In order for our users to easily find local retailers we have compiled a list of distributors. There’s some lag between the time you start distributing our products until we get notified by Seeedstudio, so if you are not in the list of distributors drop us an email and we will add you.

Crazyflie KiCad project released

2013-07-29 | Tobias | Leave a comment

We finally got the time to clean-up the Crazyflie kicad project enough to make it publicly available. It is not in a perfect shape but should be good enough to use and learn from. It’s a 4 layer board with signal layers on bottom and top and power planes in the middle. We have also uploaded the custom kicad-libs parts which should be placed in the same directory level as the kicad projects in order to make use of them, it also includes Crazyradio kicad parts.

It is released under CC BY-NC-SA license so you are able to use if for personal use, and please respect that. Please also give us feedback if you have some comments or find something that could be improved!

New server: so long and thanks for all the fish

2013-07-22 | Arnaud | Leave a comment

The Crazyflie project started as a competence project in a Swedish consulting company called Epsilon (now called ÅF). The first blog, Daedalus projects, was the competence-group blog. When crazyflie became more than yet another competence project we created our own website but Epsilon/ÅF graciously allowed us to still use the same server. We thank Epsilon/ÅF for the support but we thought it was time to be independent.

Since this week-end all the Bicraze public services run on our own server, the wiki and blog where the last pieces to move. There should be no noticeable difference except than we seems to have slightly more power now. We also are able to ramp up the server power in minutes if we ever get on Slashdot ;-).

Tell us if you see any problem or if the website suddenly became slow. Next step will be to improve the website front-page to make it more informative.

The Crazyflie and Android

2013-07-15 | Marcus | 1 Comment

Last year we quickly hacked together a client for Android to show that it was technically possible to use the Crazyflie/Crazyradio on the platform. It worked, but it wasn’t very good. After that not much has happened, until now. Thanks to contributions being made by fredg02, Sebastian Sams and bug tickets from Sascha Heymann, the hackish prototype we did is now turning into something that is actually usable. It’s still under heavy development but there’s already some new features. Here’s a quick run-down of what’s been added:

An external controller can be used instead of on-screen thumb sticks
You can scan for Crazyflies
The same flight control settings that are in the cfclient are now available (i.e advanced mode, X-mode, max roll/pitch/yaw and thrust)

So the Android client works with phones and tables that support USB host or OTG. Anything else? Well, there just happens to be an Android platform that even comes shipped with an external controller…the Ouya! So if you have an Ouya and a Crazyflie you can just side-load and you are ready to go! Since we are used to the PS3 gamepad we had some issues getting used to the Ouya controller. If you have the same issue you can pair your PS3 controller with your Ouya and use it instead!

Once the software becomes more stable an APK will be released, but until then the repository with the code and issue tracker can be found here.

Raspberry Pi pre-configured SD-card image

2013-07-08 | Marcus | 6 Comments

In order for users to be able to pilot the Crazyflie from platforms without a graphical user interface there’s now a headless client in the repository named cfheadless. It’s intended to be run the command-line and is still under development, but working.

The main reason it was made in the first place was to enable flying from the Raspberry Pi. The QT interface was very sluggish and it required all the QT dependencies to be installed. So the cfheadless client doesn’t depend on QT and doesn’t have a graphical user interface at all. For users to quickly get something working with the Raspberry Pi we prepared a pre-configured SD-card image that is based on the Raspian Wheezy. We didn’t remove anything from the image, we just added the things needed to fly the Crazyflie. It works out of the box with the Crazyradio and a PS3 controller. In order to switch to anther controller you will have to connect to the Pi and edit the configuration.

To use the image you have to edit the configuration if needed and then just connect your controller, power on the Crazyflie and lastly connect the Crazyradio. The cfheadless client will now automatically start and connect to the Crazyflie.

The image can be downloaded using this torrent or via direct download. The torrent is preferred since the direct download is limited to 6 simultaneous downloads. For more information on how to use the image have a look at the wiki page and if there’s any issues or suggestions drop by the project tracker at Bitbucker and add them. If you already have a Raspian image downloaded and running and you want to be able to use it with the Crazyflie then have a look at how we made the image or the hacks page with the original instructions.