Hello there! I am Aris, a recent graduate from the Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics Department at the University of Patras, Greece.
For the last couple of years, as a member of the Robotics Group at the University of Patras, I have been working with Bitcraze products, including the Crazyflie 2.1 and the Lighthouse Positioning System, exploring swarming scenarios. In my diploma thesis I investigated the autonomous transportation of an object by a swarm of two rope-tethered quadcopters, where the introduced path planning algorithm enables the swarm to approach, grasp, lift and transport the load.
The swarm grasping the load. Trajectories Simulation
I’m excited to join Bitcraze as part of the team, where I can further develop my skills and gain valuable work experience. My principal objective is to improve the Lighthouse Positioning System and contribute to the development of a new solution for tracking in larger volumes. During this time, I look forward to deepen my knowledge on Bitcraze’s products and learn how they apply in real-world applications.
After a busy fall of testing and fine-tuning, we’re thrilled to announce that the Brushless is now available! Our team has put in a lot of effort to ensure it meets our high standards, and we can’t wait for you to experience it.
If you’re curious to see it in action, we’ve featured the Brushless in our recent Christmas video, where it showcases its capabilities by navigating through Christmas obstacles with precision.
For those interested in its application in research, our latest blog post demonstrates how the Brushless can be used in academic settings. It’s exciting to see the potential it holds for various fields!
If you need anything to keep your Brushless flying, all spare parts are already stocked in our store. Additionally, many of our bundles now offer Brushless versions, providing more options to suit your needs.
We’re eager to hear your thoughts and feedback as you explore the capabilities of our latest drone. Your insights are invaluable to us and help drive our continuous improvement.
We look forward to seeing what you’ll achieve with the Brushless!
Robotics and Simulation at FOSDEM 25
Arnaud will be at Fosdem the 1st and 2nd of February 2025 in Brussels, Belgium. He’s actually hosting with Kimberly the robotics and simulation dev-room! If you’re in Brussels, we’ll be happy to meet you.
2024 is almost over and 2025 is coming fast so it is a good time for us to think about what is coming for Bitcraze in 2025.
Projects
2025 will be the year of the Crazyflie 2.1 Brushless! We are finally releasing it early January. The end of the development phase was longer that expected (who would have thought manufacturing would be hard … :-), but it is now ready and we are very excited to see what awesome projects the community will come up with using the Crazyflie Brushless.
With the Crazyflie 2.1 Brushless released, we will have more time to dedicate to other projects. Following is a list of fields we think we might look at, no strong promises here though and if you think we should focus on anything specific do not hesitate to drop a comment under this post, a post on github discussions or just send us an email. We have way too many ideas, but we are always open to more :-).
We still have the Lighthouse deck V2 in the back-burner, this is likely something we will look more at soon. As a reminder, the new deck is going to support lighthouse systems with 16 base-stations which will increase the space that can be covered by a lighthouse system
We also have a Wifi camera deck in early prototype, we have been showing it at various conferences in the last years. We are still working on trying to find the perfect Wifi-chip/processor/Camera combo to make it a reality.
We (ie. I) also have a lot of ideas on how to improve the communication with the Crazyflie. Crazyradio 2.0 has a lot of untaped capabilities that we can use to implement better, easier to use and more reliable communication protocols so this is definitely something we want to have a look at.
Finally, I apparently managed to sell the Rust programming language a bit too well to the team. Some of us are even more enthusiastic than I am about it! This together with an increased frustration with Python and PyQT6 distribution to various platform will likely make us experimenting even more in Rust in the future. The first target in sight is to write a Rust lib for the Crazyflie together with binding for various languages including Python and C/C++. This means that would be able to have only one lib for most use case of the Crazyflie both in Python and in ROS.
Conferences
Arnaud is part of the organizing committee of the FOSDEM Robotics and Simulation devroom at Fosdem. Fosdem is one of the biggest open source conferences in Europe. It is an awesome community-driven conference, so if you are not too far and are interested in open-source please join us in Brussels the 1st and 2nd of February 2025!
As usual we will likely participate to a couple of robotic conferences during the year. We are not yet sure which one though so stay tuned for more information on this blog.
Team
The team has been evolving in 2024, we are now 6 in the Malmö office, Mandy is working from Shenzhen in China handling the production and Joe is doing a post-doc in Stockholm in close collaboration with us.
We are actively looking at hiring 2 more team members, one in technical support and one in Sales. Our goal is to build a team where all of us can focus on our strengths to develop even further and faster the Crazyflie ecosystem.
We wish you a great new year filled with hacking and exciting new discoveries!
The Crazyflie 2.1 Brushless with propeller guards on a prototype charging padThe optimized brushless motor
Finalizing the integration of the Crazyflie 2.1 Brushless into our software ecosystem and expanding its documentation were key steps in preparing for its launch. These efforts ensure compatibility, improve the user experience, and make the platform more accessible to the community. We’re looking forward to a smooth launch and to seeing how the community will utilize the new platform!
This year, we introduced updates to the Crazyflie 2.1 kit, making the 47-17 propellers the new default and including an improved battery. These upgrades enhance flight performance and endurance, culminating in the release of the Crazyflie 2.1+—an optimized iteration of our established platform.
And don’t forget the developer meetings, where we shared some more behind the scenes information and collected invaluable feedback from the community.
We also released a new edition of our research compilation video, showcasing some of the coolest projects from 2023 and 2024 that highlight the versatility and impact of the Crazyflie platform in research.
Team
In the past year, Bitcraze saw significant changes within the team. in February, Rik rejoined the team. Tove started at Bitcraze in April. Mandy, with whom we’ve already worked extensively over the years, joined as our production representative in Shenzen. At the end of the year, we said goodbye to Kimberly, whose contributions will be deeply missed. Additionally, we had Björn with us for a few months, working on his master’s thesis on fault detection, and Joe continued his industrial postdoc at Bitcraze that began in December 2023. Looking ahead, Bitcraze is hiring for two new roles: a Technical Sales Lead and a Technical Success Engineer, to support our ongoing projects and customer collaborations.
Midsummer lunch with the teamChristmas-themed Bitcraze office
As we close the chapter on 2024, we’re proud of the progress we’ve made, the connections we’ve strengthened, and the milestones we’ve reached. With exciting launches, new faces on the team, and continued collaboration with our community, we’re ready to soar to even greater heights in 2025. Thank you for being part of our journey!
This Christmas, Bitcraze is sending out a callout to Santa. As it turns out, one of our Brushless prototypes has a lifelong dream of becoming one of Santa’s reindeer. In a hopeful attempt to fulfill its wishes, we shot a video to prove that it’s ready for Santa’s most elite aerial team!
Imagine a tiny, determined drone with big dreams, practicing its sleigh route moves with the intensity of an Olympic athlete. Our little Brushless is proving it has what it takes to join the North Pole’s premier delivery squad.
Going through small openings, avoiding obstacles, and flying in perfect precision are skills that any good reindeer should have – but here, the Brushless accomplish this in an autonomous flight, and in a much smaller and more practical package than Rudolph and consorts.
Of course, there’s some technical magic behind this Christmas miracle. For this project, we relied on stock firmware and Python library, taking advantage of the new spiral and constant velocity features (check out the GitHub PR here). These features added variety and fluidity to the maneuvers, moving beyond straight lines and making the flight more interesting. By using the high-level commander, we took a simpler approach compared to trajectory optimization, which we’ve used in past Christmas videos. Trajectory optimization would have been far more difficult for this project due to the unique challenges of the flight path—namely its length and the need for pinpoint accuracy near obstacles and through gates.
Positioning relied on four Lighthouse base stations, which we used to manually locate the Christmas wreaths by holding the drone within each one to log their exact coordinates. This project also gave us the opportunity to further integrate the Brushless into our firmware and Python libraries, setting the stage for a smoother launch in the new year. The Brushless impressed us yet again during this project. Even though we’ve tested it extensively in the past, seeing it navigate tight gates with such precision and handle the demanding flight path reinforced just how capable it is. Working with it in this setting has made us even more excited to release it soon and share its potential with everyone.
Santa, if you’re reading this, we think we’ve found your next top reindeer recruit. You can watch the full audition tape here or below:
And if you think what you just saw is a pretty straight-forward and easy path, think again! This year’s blooper video highlights the resilience of the Crazyflie 2.1 Brushless and the fast, iterative workflow we used for this project. Since testing reliability and resilience was a key goal, we adopted a workflow that allowed for quick scripting, flying, and adjusting—often completing the cycle in just minutes. This approach made crashes more likely, especially during the spiral sections where the drone struggled to keep up and started cutting corners. While we resolved the issue by slowing those sections down, we suspect that more aggressive tuning of the Mellinger controller could have helped the drone maintain speed without cutting corners. The Brushless managed some impressive recoveries, but even minor collisions usually meant it couldn’t keep pace with the rest of the trajectory. After all the trial and error, we had a stable and reliable setup that not only performed well for the demo but also flew beautifully when we showed it to our families at the Christmas party.
Here is what our Brushless could endure during training:
Merry Christmas from all of us at Bitcraze – where even our prototypes have holiday dreams!
Hi everyone! I have a bit of news to share… I’ve decided to leave Bitcraze at the end of 2024. But not before I share with you my latest Fun Friday project that I’ve tried my best to finish up before I leave before my Christmas holiday in December.
Frankensteining the Pololu Robot with the Crazyflie Bolt
During the ROSCon talk about the lighthouse system (see the recording here), I’ve already shown a small example of how the lighthouse system could be used on other robots as well. Here you see a Pololu RPI 2040 (the hyper edition of course), with a slimmed down Crazyflie Bolt and a Lighthouse deck. The UART2 port on the Bolt (pinout is the same as Crazyflie) is interfacing with the UART0 connection on the Pololu (pinout). Then the Pololu’s 3v3 is connected to the vUSB and GND to GND (obviously), so 4 wires in total. Technically, the 3v3 port is not supplying enough power for the Crazyflie on paper, but it seemed to be enough as long as the Crazyflie Bolt doesn’t have motors connected it should be fine. But if anyone would like to do a driving-flying hybrid with this combo, you might need to check the specifications a bit closer. For now, just ignore the red low-battery LED on the Bolt, but if you see it restarting then perhaps give the Pololu a fresh set of batteries.
Since the Pololu RPI 2040 doesn’t have any wireless communication, this can be done through the Crazyflie Bolt and the Crazyradio. I’ve made an app layer variant for the Bolt to forward state estimates and velocity commands; however, it did require a bit of an extra logging variable in the firmware itself. But this allows me to control the Pololu through the CFclient! Since it’s using velocity commands, this means that the mobile app is out though, but perhaps if anyone is interested in getting this rolling, let me know. Also, the screen shows the current X, Y, Z, and yaw estimate of the Bolt transferred to the Pololu with the commands that I’ve given it.
I’d like to have connected this to a differential drive controller to make use of the position setpoints, but unfortunately the AA batteries ran out at the office and I was unable to complete this by the last day. It would have been great to use the Lighthouse positioning for this. Perhaps in the next coming months, I can try to continue with it and have my cats chase an autonomous robot around the house, who knows! If anyone is interested in playing around with this, these are the repositories/branches for both the Bolt and the Pololu:
First of all, I’ll take a long holiday in the US, first visiting New York (first time) before I hop over to Tulsa and Santa Barbara to visit family. Early 2025 I’ll be taking a long break, or a mini sabbatical of sorts, where I plan to work on some personal projects but mostly have a breather. I haven’t had a break like this in over 15 years, and given a tough 2023, I can definitely say that I’ve deserved some time off. What will happen after, I will hopefully figure out then, but for sure I will be continuing to co-lead the Aerial Robotics Interest Group at ROS and helping out in support of the Crazyswarm2 project.
I’d like to thank my colleagues at Bitcraze for an amazing 5 years here in Malmö, Sweden, and everyone that I was able to meet through them. I’ve learned a lot in terms of joint software development, code maintenance, community interaction, and, most importantly, having fun during work. I also will never forget the support I received while I was going through cancer treatment, and for that I’m very grateful. I wish you all the best and I hope the Crazyflie continues to thrive, saving more PhD projects as it did mine. Thank you.
November is always a tough month in Sweden, when the darkness deepens and the cold begins to bite. We had our first snow last week, a sudden reminder that winter has arrived. So instead of letting the gloom settle in, we decided to turn to what makes us feel good: pretty lights, pretty trees, and pepparkakor!
I realized that, although we talked about it last year, we never fully showed our big new flight arena once it was up and running. It made an appearance in our latest Christmas video, but was actually never fully revealed before. Capturing a 110square meters space in a single photo is no small feat, but here is my best shot:
It felt the right time to make the office feel a little more wintery. It may be a little early, but we couldn’t resist the charm of festive decorations and a cozy atmosphere to brighten up the dark days. Especially now that we’re more settled into our massive flight arena – a space this large calls for many more Christmas lights! Of course, there’s more to it than just creating a Netflix-Christmas-movie vibe—we’re also gearing up for two big events: our annual Christmas party, which will be hosted here, and the filming of our newest Christmas video!
Speaking of Christmas video, that’s exactly what we’ll be diving into during our next dev meeting! We recently had a great time revisiting how we’ve used demos to guide development – if you missed that particular dev meeting, you can see it here. We thought it would be a great idea to dedicate our next session to exploring all the Christmas videos we’ve created over the years. It’s fascinating to see how our Christmas projects have evolved over time and we hope you’ll join us to reminisce about it Wednesday 11th of December at 15.00 (CET). You’ll find all the info here.
It’s been a while since I last talked about hiring! We successfully onboarded our most recent recruit, and now it’s time to start planning for the future.
One of our challenges as a team is that we’re very heavy on engineers and developers. While that’s fantastic for building products, it means we lack expertise in other important areas. That’s why we’re now shifting our focus to bringing in talent to help fill those gaps. We’ve partnered with a recruitment agency once again to help us find the right people for the job. We’re currently hiring for two distinct roles—here’s what we’re looking for!
Technical sales lead
You will be responsible for developing and implementing sales strategies while exploring both new and existing markets. You’ll take the lead in driving sales and acquiring new customers, becoming the company’s go-to expert on marketing and sales tactics. Your day-to-day tasks will include supporting business development, optimizing sales processes, and proposing effective marketing strategies. This role is perfect for someone with a background in technical sales with a strong strategic mindset and a sense of responsibility.
We’re looking for a Technical Success Engineer to provide our customers with technical guidance and product expertise. This role involves offering first-line support, creating documentation and tutorials, and assisting with tech-focused sales efforts. The goal is to ensure a smooth and seamless customer experience while building strong client relationships. It’s an ideal position for a “social developer”—someone with a solid technical background who also excels in communication and enjoys engaging with others.
Both positions are full-time and based at our office in Malmö, Sweden. If you’re curious about why you should join our team, I’ve already shared some of the many reasons why I love being part of Bitcraze.
If you’re interested or have any questions, please send an email to fredric.vernqvist@techtalents.se or contact us at contact@bitcraze.se.
It’s been 2 weeks ago that we went to ROSCon ’24 in Odense Denmark as exhibitor and silver sponsor! Since it was a 2-hour train ride for us, it made much sense for us to attend this as a company and we are very happy we did. In this blog post we are sharing our experiences of the event.
The Booth Build-up and Demo
We made some changes to our well-known cage that is a must at every conference we have exhibited. Usually, it would take us a good few hours just to set up the cage alone, but we have improved the corners which improved our build-up experience quite a lot and we were done within an hour! Just in time for us to join the tours and bird of feather sessions with no stress!
All done before 11 am!
For ROSCon we prepared a more ROSflavored demo that enabled full demo control from ROS, which was based on the swarming mapping demo shown in this tutorial and the robotics developer day (see this video). Here we already hit a couple of issues that all had to do with the differences between demos for exhibitions versus one-time talk demos (see OpenCV! Live episode where we talked about demo driven development). We switched back to our usual fully decentralized autonomous swarm demo (see this blog post). Luckily, the Crazyflie could still communicate at the same time to give through the multiranger values, such that the computer could still generate the Swarm merging map while the Crazyflies were flying around avoiding each other.
Exhibition Booth
Tuesday and Wednesday were the actually exhibition days so that is when we talked with most of the people. It was a bit slow in the beginning as we were located at the end of the hall, but luckily the ROSCon passport game motivated people to go by each of the booth to get a stamp. We went a bit rogue and made our own much bigger stamp ;) but luckily it still fit as long as we aligned properly. We donated a STEM Ranging bundle as one of the prizes to congratulate whoever won this! And now they can try out this ROS tutorial ;)
Talking to people outside and inside the cage
We noticed that the Crazyflie Brushless got a lot of attention. The ability to carry more than a regular Crazyflie seemed of great interest to many of the ROSCon attendees. Moreover, the prototype of the forward-facing expansion connector (a.k.a. the Camera deck) was also a well-requested feature of the Crazyflie and has solidified our belief that the community needs something like this as well. In general, the lighthouse positioning system and the stand-alone lighthouse node were also quite well received. Luckily we were able to forward people to our accepted talk about the Lighthouse position system on Thursday
Lighthouse Positioning Talk
One of the reasons we were present at ROSCon 2024 was to gauge the interest of the general robotics community in the lighthouse positioning system. We have been using it for years for the Crazyflies, but we’d like to also evangelize its submillimeter and cost-effective awesomeness for any other platform. And there seems to be quite some interest for it! We gave a short presentation on Thursday Afternoon during the ‘ROS Tooling & Testing’ session (we will share the recording once it becomes available).
Talk about Lighthouse Positioning – Taken by Dharini Dutia from Women in Robotics
We also send out some polls just to see what kind of positioning systems are used and for what purpose. It was evident that there are many outdoor roboticists that also use onboard-sensing based state-estimation like SLAM, but there was still a significant portion of people that used indoor positioning systems for the actual positioning replacement and/or Ground truth. And also we got some valuable feedback, like if it would still work out with a Lidar or Kinect, or if it is suitable for a 12-meter size robot (wow). We will take this all in for improvements for any new upgrades to the lighthouse deck and stand-alone nodes for it. Thanks to you all for providing all the feedback and the interest!
Side-events
We also attended a couple of events related to ROSCon 2024. Marcus and Kimberly both attended tours of Odense Robotics, Universal robots and Teradyne facilities. The tour of the SDU Drone Center was particularly impressive. Moreover, we also attended the Aerial Robotics Meetup, who attracted about 90-100 people at the max, with drinks and snacks provided by Dronecode Foundation. It was great to see such a big aerial presence at ROSCon. There was also the Karaoke meetup, the ROSCon afterparty by Odense Robotics with a beer-serving robot arm, the Women in Robotics lunch… there was just too much to attend to but it all was a great success!
Check out the ROSCon 2024 event page on our website of what we have shown at ROSCon 2024 and see more information about the demos/products we had there.
We have some very busy weeks behind us and ahead! As we are working hard on releasing the new CF Brushless, we have been preparing for the upcoming ROSCon in Odense Denmark next week (see this previous blogpost) and we also featured on the latest OpenCV live episode as well! So more about both in this blogpost.
OpenCV Live! Demo Driven Development
We were featured as guests on the latest OpenCV Live! episode hosted by Phil Nelson and Satya Mallick, where we went through a bit of the history of the start of Bitcraze and all of the (crazy) demos done with the Crazyflie in the last decade. We have done a similar topic for our latest developer meeting, but for this episode we put the focus more on vision based demos, since OpenCV has been definitely used in the past at Bitcraze for various reasons! Just type in OpenCV in the top right search barto check out any of the blogs we have written.
During the OpenCV live episode of the 10th of October, Arnaud and Kimberly told the backstories of these demos that went from a manual flight fail where Arnaud flew the Crazyflie 1.0 in Marcus’ hair, using OpenCV and Aruco markers for positioning to flying a swarm in your kitchen. It was really fun to do and alos one lucky listener managed to answer the two questions the host Phil asked at the end, namely “Where does the name Crazyflie come from?” and “Why is the last part (‘-flie’) spelled this way?” and won a STEM ranging bundle. If you’d like to know the answers, go and watch the latest OpenCV! Live episode ;) Enjoy!
ROSCon – What to expect?
So next week we will be present as Silver Sponsor at ROSCon Odense, namely on Monday 21th and Wednesday 23rd of October. The Bitcraze booth will be located on number 21 so that should be near the coffee break place! We will have are old trusty cage with some upgrades with a nice ROS demo which is similar to the one explained in this Crazyflie ROS tutorial we have written a while ago, but then the swarming variant of it. We also hope to show a Brushless Crazyflie Prototype, and a new camera deck prototype, along with anything else we can find lying around at our office :D.
Moreover, Arnaud will be given a presentation on the lighthouse positioning system, namely at Wednesday 23rd of October 14:40 (2:30 pm) called ‘The Lighthouse project: from Virtual Reality to Onboard Positioning for Robotics’. The lighthouse positioning system will also be the system that we will demo at our booth so if you’d like to see it for yourself, or perhaps (during downtime) hack around together with us, you are more than welcome to do so! Check out the Bitcraze ROSCon Eventpage for more details about our demo or the hardware we will show.
