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 release of the python Crazyflie client

2016-04-18 | Arnaud | Leave a comment

We have just released a new version 2016.04.1 of the Crazyflie client.

client_2016.4.1

The biggest change is actually not so visible but very important: we have now separated the GUI client from the Crazyflie lib. The great advantage is that the lib became a small project and could be pushed to pypi. This means that if you want to control Crazyflie from your own Python program all you have to do is to “pip install cflib” and you are ready to “import cflib” in your program to control the Crazyflie.

For the new release of the client we also pushed the client in pypi as well. This will be mainly useful in Linux and Mac where you are now able to install the client with “pip3 install cfclient”. One little drawback however: since the GUI lib we are using, pyqt, is not in pypi it has to be installed on the side. This can be done in Ubuntu with something like “sudo apt-get python3-pyqt4 install python3-pyqtgraph” or on Mac with homebrew or MacPorts.

Last but not least we have enabled Windows continuous integration with appveyor and fixed the Windows build. This means that a Windows build and installer are going to be generated for every commit in the Crazyflie client repos. Maintaining the Windows client has always been a challenge to us since we are mainly Linux users, so the this will help a lot to keep good Windows support. We still consider this Windows build to be somewhat experimental so please test it and report any bug you are hitting.

The last system to support for executable distribution is Mac. We did put some time trying to generate a mac app out of the client without any success. If anyone wants to give it a try or have some tips please head to the ticket on github.

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!

Crazyflie 2.0 drones used in amazing TED talk

2016-02-22 | Tobias | 3 Comments

If you haven’t watched it already, make sure to watch the TED talk “Raffaello D’Andrea: Meet the dazzling flying machines of the future”!

We are super excited to see that they use the Crazyflie 2.0 drones for the firefly swarm demo in the end of the talk. After all, our goal is to enable people to test their ideas, so this awesome demo makes us thrilled!

Community request

2016-02-15 | Kristoffer Richardsson | 5 Comments

Greetings all community members!

This week we have a couple of requests that we hope you can help out with. First of all we would love to hear about all the cool projects you are using the Crazyflie for out there. We have wanted to collect this for a long time and now we have found hackster.io. Go to https://www.hackster.io/bitcraze/projects and add your favourite project. Also make sure to follow us at https://www.hackster.io/bitcraze, if you don’t have an account already it’s quick to create one, our hope is to use hackster.io to create a new way for our community to grow.

Secondly we are curious of how the Crazyflie is used in education. If you are using it as a teacher or as a student, we would be very happy if you send us an email to education@bitcraze.io and describe how you use it and any other feedback you have.

Last week we finished the manufacturing of the first alpha builds of our new positioning system. A few systems have been shipped to selected users for initial trials but we still have a few left, so if you are interested in trying one out, drop us an email at contact@bitcraze.io and describe what you would use it for.

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 decks heading into production

2015-12-14 | Marcus | 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:

[Show as slideshow]

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 | Marcus | 3 Comments

cf2 front rosette It’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.