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!
It’s been a while since we summed up things happening in the community so here’s some of the things that are happening. There’s lots of more things, so if you think we are missing something, then post it in the comments below.
Ralph has been doing some work on an semi-automatic flip feature in the client. There’s more info on the forum and video below.
Last week we tested some modifications made by otto for a headfree mode (i.e yaw only rotates the platform, not the referance direction). It’s a really nice feeling just rotating without taking care of the direction you are going in :-) There’s more information and links to code on the forum.
The SHERPA project have been working on swarm algorithms using a vision system and the Crazyflie.
Geof from Centeye have been working on optical flow stabilization using the Crazyflie. He has a prototype board working and there’s lots of information in the forum about this build. To see the results have a look at the video below.
Thanks to Victor the Deviation firmware for Devo-7e (custom firmware for Devo RC-controllers) now has support for the Crazyflie (needs hardware hack). If you would like to give it a try have a look at the code or grab one of the nightlies.
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have been testing a new concept for a HoverBall using the Crazyflie. Imagine throwing a ball into the air that doesn’t come down (well not right away at least..). Here’s some more info and a picture.
We have also seen some nice stand alone controllers for the Crazyflie, one by MidLifeCrisis (more info here) and one by ivandevel (video below) . There’s also more info in the forum.
There also some updates on the work done by Oliver on the Kinect tracking of the Crazyflie. A demo video is shown below (it looks great!) and there’s more information on the forum.
And finally here’s a nice video we found on Youtube showing position control of the Crazyflie using a VICON system.
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!
A couple of weeks ago we moved into the Malmö based business incubator Minc. It’s a great chance to get some extra help developing Bitcraze and also to get a chance to meet people from other start-ups. Below is a picture of a bunch of Crazyflies in our lab (i.e the table designated lab).
On a more technical note, here’s a video of a blimp that was hacked together with some left over party-balloons and a broken Crazyflie that we had lying around. It’s the day after the party, so there wasn’t that much lift left in the balloons (that’s why we have a bunch of them). After a few hacks to the firmware it actually works pretty well! The motors power has been redistributed and only the Yaw regulation is active, which explains that the yaw is still pretty stable, we are thinking about pushing the ‘blimp-mode’ at some point (first we will need more balloons and Helium though :) ).
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.
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.
Last week was mostly spent preparing for, and travelling to Devoxx. It’s always great to get out a bit and meet other nerds, discuss technology and do some flying. Devoxx is a Java conference so we didn’t think that many people would be interested in hearing about quads and low-level embedded. But we were really happy to see that lots of people showed up for the presentation.
Presenting is fun, but the most fun part is always hanging around before and after. Meeting people, discussing and flying. This time we also got a chance to do some hacking with the team from MYO. Hopefully we will get our hands on a developer unit early next year :-)
The Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter kits, bundles and spare parts are now back in stock at Seeedstudio, but we are still waiting for the Crazyradio to be re-stocked. Our products are selling quicker than we expected, so if you want one for Christmas don’t wait too long to place the order.
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Here’s some video of the FPV flying demo taken from someone in the audience.
As you can see the webpage looks a bit different this Monday. For a long time we have had the feeling that new users coming to our webpage don’t get an overview of what we do and what the Crazyflie is. So we decided to put in a front page that is intended to introduce Bitcraze and the Crazyflie to new visitors. Since we feel that our blog is an important part of what we do we also added the last blog post to the bottom of the front page. If you are looking for the full blog it’s moved here, also there’s a link in the top menu.
We have also gotten the comment that there’s no information on the actual website, it’s all on the wiki. So we have added some new pages with a bit more descriptions of the development environment and the products. We will keep adding more and more information as we go. There’s still lots of work to do for the page and to enhance the website design, but we decided on doing it incrementally :-)
The nice new photos (in the slider and other images) are courtesy of our friend Johan Jeppsson, thanks!