BAM days | Bitcraze

We’ve had an exciting year in 2021, and we’re eager to see what 2022 will bring ! Let’s see what’s in the pipeline and what we hope for this new year.

Products

The AI deck and Bolt out of Early Access

We’ve put a lot of efforts during these last months on working with the AI deck’s firmware and infrastructure. With great help of our intern Rik, we managed to make huge leaps, and hopefully sometimes in the coming months we’ll be able to share what we worked on. I can already tell you that the incoming release will bring some needed improvements on flashing on the GAP8 chip and improved image streaming! As the AI deck is one of the most challenging of our decks, we also hope to add an extensive tutorial (that we call the “mega tutorial”) to help you working with it.

Also we have started to push some framework changes to make it easier for you to make bigger drones with the Crazyflie Bolt. One of those are the persistent parameter system that we have recently implemented on the Crazyflie’s, so we will add more and more of these types of features. The hope is, is that we are able to provide some kind of assembly kit for a larger Bolt-based drone, of which we already did some initial battery investigations for.

Prototypes

Fun Fridays are usually our time to play around with new possibilities and prototypes. Marcus has already made great strides, and hopefully in 2022 we’ll be able to go even farther with those. Arnaud has also been working on the much waited new iteration of the Crazyradio, with a new chip and an improved communication protocol. Tobias, our dedicated hardware man, has also ideas down the pipes in the form of a brushless Crazyflie as we already showed in our future plans presentation of November’s BAMdays. Also we hope to initiate the design process of a new and improved version of the Crazyflie with more power and processing capabilities.

People and Collaborations

Last year we have continued our close collaboration with researchers at institutes and universities, to help them out with achieving their goals and contribute their work to our opensource firmware and software. It proves really fruitful, both for us and the people we talk to, so we hope 2022 will see yet again closer and newer connections.

We were really happy with our first own online conference, which helped us reconnect and talk to our community about all the awesomeness achieved with the Crazyflies. We hope to implement something similar on a more regular basis, to keep talking about collaborations, possibilities, and in general sharing all the work that’s been done on the platform. Those “lightweight” BAM should arrive soon, so keep updated if you want to join them!

Component shortage and productions issues

We expect to still deal with the component shortage, as it is expected to last for at least another year, even two. Production is therefore a continuous challenge, with a lot of unpredictability, and we will find better solutions to deal with it in 2022. Thankfully, we have good hopes on keeping good stock levels throughout the crisis, as we’ve increased our stock. We’ll of course keep you updated on any big updates regarding the crisis and how it is affecting it us.

Unfortunately, the component shortage also means that it’s harder to make prototypes. It’s difficult to find and/or buy just one chip, so it causes delays in our creative hardware developments. It is what it is… but we will sure be able to find solutions – as we did during our 10 years’ history!

Anything else?

Of course our heads are always full of ideas and we are passionate to work on anything! We have ambitions in developing a simulation for our users or CI, doing more measurements with the new thrust stand or adding further improvements to our documentation and tutorials. And we might also meet new interesting people (digitally or in person?) who might give us enough inspiration to start something completely new! Soon we will have our quarterly meeting, where we try to herd and select our passions and ideas into conceivable plans and actions.

With all these exciting projects, we’re really excited to see what 2022 has in store for us! I hope you too have an awesome year 2022.

The BAM days are coming up !

Only 8 days left before the first Bitcraze-organized conference ever. We are really excited about it, and this coming week is pretty much dedicated to organize the conference. We’re working hard on getting the best experience possible for there 3 days, both for us and for you. That means collaborating with great speakers, creating awesome workshops, but also think about the best way to come together – one of the main purpose behind the BAM days.

It’s been a couple of months since we decided that we wanted to organize our own conference. The main idea behind it was that we missed going to conferences, meeting people and talking with a lot of interesting persons.

Bitcraze turning 10 felt like a big occasion that we wanted to celebrate. And indeed we did, internally, but we wanted to share this accomplishment with you too. An online conference seemed like the best idea. So when time came to choose a platform for it, we looked for something which put emphasis on social experience. We finally went with the Welkom platform, from the Netherlands. It’s easy and natural to use, with a simple interface, and lots of options for us to organize different activities.

The Welkom platform we’ll use hosts two different Mibo rooms. It’s a spatial chat, where your avatar can run around a 3D world, discovering different environments. Your camera is your head, so you’ll need a webcam to join. There are some fun activities around, plenty interactive stuff, from chairs to basketballs. We have used it to for our coffee breaks when we were working from home, and had fun using this world: we’ll be happy to meet you there and hope you’ll find it fun too.

The plan is to have between each talk or workshop at least 30 minutes in Mibo to talk to the speakers, take a coffee break, discuss the exciting things that’s been happening, and generally catch up in ways we haven’t be able to the past year.

At the end of each day, we’ve programmed social events to gather together. On Tuesday, we’ll host a special quizz. Telling you its content may be a bit cheating, but if we’ve read our blogposts regularly, the questions should not seem hard to you. For the winner, a once-in-a-lifetime reward: a GoldenFlie ! You will be able to put it in your chimney mantle with your others awards, or actually use it – because, yes, it flies!

The second day, Wednesday, we’ll have a roundtable with Q&A. A perfect occasion for us to get feedback from you, and for you to ask us all the questions you have been burning to ask us.

The last day (Thursday), we’ll talk a little about Bitcraze and its future: where it is headed. We’ll then have a last party – in Mibo of course.

All the program and other useful information is in our event page. We really hope you’ll take some time to come by and say hello !