We are always looking for fun things to hack together using the Crazyflie. The last couple of weeks we contributed to two exciting open hardware campaigns on Indiegogo that we are hoping to get our hands on soon.

The VoCore

First up is the VoCore, a coin-sized SoC breakout with WiFi running Linux. Based on the RT5350, it could be used for WiFi control (with AP support) or to add extra power for doing calculations.

The second one is the 3Dpad, an open source gesture controller. We have been using the Leap Motion for flying before, and we are really eager to try the concept but with an open source project. Even tough the 3Dpad doesn’t support the same hand/finger tracking as the Leap Motion, we are hoping that we can hack together a usable controller for the Crazyflie. It uses capacitive technology that makes it possible to place it behind materials that are not transparent. Imagine placing it under the desk and flying with your hand above the desk!

Best of luck to the projects with financing and development!

Last year we presented the Crazyflie at Devoxx Belgium and last month we got a chance to do it again at Devoxx France (but in french). To complete our Devoxx tour we also accepted an invitation to Devoxx UK. But this time we won’t be presenting, we will only be flying :-). Normally when we speak conferences we hang out at the conference before and after the presentation. It’s a really great way to meet other geeks, discuss and have a lot of fun. So this time around we will only be hanging out in the exhibition hall. If you are going make sure to come by our table and do some flying!

This week we are heading off to Paris in France to present our project at Devoxx France. So if you are there and want to listen, then drop by the Ella Fitzgerald room at 10:40. The presentation will be in french and it will of course end with some demos :-) We will also hang around after the presentation just in case someone wants to test their flying skills. We are currently working on some nice light-effects using the Adafruit Neo Pixel ring that we will show off.

Also the Crazyflie is finally back in stock at Seeedstudio!

Last week was a hectic but exiting week for me. First I visited Embedded World in Nürnberg and then made a visit to TUM university in München.

I was actually visiting Embedded World because ST Microelectronics contacted us and wondered if we could do a Crazyflie version with the more powerful STM32F3 and use ST MEMS sensors. So during the winter we did some prototypes where we fitted the pin compatible STM32F303CB and a LSM9DS0 9-axis MEMS module. Porting the code was pretty straight forward and took about a week. It was manly the drivers that needed porting but getting the FPU running also took some time. Our quick bench-marking test showed an ~35% increase of the floating point intense code and by using further speed boosters like the core coupled memory (CCM) it could probably be increased a lot more. Right now these extra CPU cycles aren’t really needed but for the future when more complex sensor fusion algorithms might be used they will be valuable. Therefore the STM32F3 series it very interesting as it packs plenty of processing power in a small package.

Having the ST-prototype on display in the ST booth at embedded world was quite a strange feeling. Something that started out as a fun thing to do on our free time is now sitting on a wall at big cenvenstion as EW, kind of hard to grasp. Unfortunately we where not allowed to fly around and play with it due to restrictions but I had a great time there anyway. I also participated in a short interview which ST arranged, really strange seeing yourself like that. I should probably focus on my engineering career instead… :-)

After the EW I went to visit the Techische Universität München TUM, as one of our most active users Oliver is studying there. Oliver made an awesome HUD and also contributed with most of the altitude hold code, and since München only is an hour away by train it was a great opportunity to go visit him. Oliver arranged so that Jacob from the computer vision group invited me to their department where they demonstrated some of their work, especially their work done with computer vision and quadcopters. Amazing stuff! I really hope we can do something together in the future and make this technology widespread.

[Show as slideshow]

We have started the migration to GitHub, as usual with this kind of things it is not as obvious as we had thought at first. We decided to start with the most active repos which is currently the PC client. In the process it will be renamed crazyflie-clients-python to show that it contains the python libs and it works on more than just PC (ie. raspbery pie at least).

The source code migration is a little challenge due to the very different way Git and Mercurial handle branches. Using git-remote-hg we could pull the mercurial repos in a newly created git repos and then push the interesting branches and tags to github. This seems to work quite well but the last things we would like to have is the possibility to pull changes made in git to mercurial so that we could keep the current mercurial as a read-only mirror. Internally some of us plan to still work with mercurial anyway using hg-git and the great TortoiseHG.

For migrating the issues from BitBucket to GitHub we forked this script to add some functionality. Aside from copying the title/text/comments, we also wanted to map the metadata from BitBucket to labels/milestones on GitHub. So the modified script first creates/sets the correct milestone on GitHub and then creates/sets the labels according to a JSON mapping of BitBucket metadata to GitHub labels. It supports mapping of kind, status, priority and component to zero or more labels. The modified script is available here. While doing tests we discovered that github was sending a mail for every single ticket and comment, a collateral damage was one of our mailbox that got 303 messages in a couple of minutes (the smartphone attached to the mailbox actually played notification tunes for hours…).

As our source control system, we have been using Mercurial since a few years now and we like it. But lately we have been thinking about migrating our projects to GitHub, which would also mean a migration to git. One of the key reasons we are thinking about this is of course popularity, but also that GitHub seems to be better at handling cooperation and contributions. Our experience with GitHub is limited, but we have been using git in projects every now and then. So we would love to get some feedback on this. Even though it’s possible to push code on both (even easily between git/hg) we would like to stick with one alternative for bug tracking, milestones and such.

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During the week we are working on preparing a new software release, at least for the pc client. A couple of things happens since last release including better log graph and altitude hold. Also the driver situation for windows will become better as we found a way to install the Crazyradio driver without restarting windows in maintenance mode. Finally we now have a mac and are planning more support for it in the future, no promises for this release though.

We wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year! A big thanks to our users and community for supporting us during the year. We are really looking forward to 2014, there’s going to be lot’s a exiting things happening!

Don’t forget about the holiday contest where you can win Crazyflies! If you feel like joining in, submit your entry to holiday_hacking_2013@bitcraze.se before the end of Sunday the 12th of January 2014. It’s going to be interesting to see how much spam we get when we write the address without obfuscation and even link it ;-)

Oh, and in case you missed it, here’s a shameless re-post of our holiday video. To be fare it does say Happy New Year at the end.