It’s that time of the year again ! As the days get darker and darker here in Sweden, we’re happy to getting some time off to share some warmth with our families.
And to kick off the holiday season, we prepared a little treat for you ! We enjoyed making a Christmas video that tested how we could use the Crazyflie at home. Since we’re not at the office anymore, we decided to fly in our homes and this video shows the different ways to do so. First, take a look at what we’ve done:
Now let’s dig into the different techniques we used.
Tobias decided to fly the Bolt manually. His first choice was to land in the Christmas sock, but that was too hard, thereof the hard landing in top of the tree. We were not sure who would survive: the tree or the Bolt!
Kimberly installed two base stations V2’s and after setting up, determined some way points by holding the Crazyflie in her hand. Then she generated a trajectory with the uav_trajectories project (like in the hyper demo). Then she used the cflib to upload this trajectory and make the crazyflie fly all the way to the basket. Her two cats could have looked more impressed, though!
Using trials and errors, Barbara used the Flowdeck, the motion commander, and a broken measuring tape to calibrate the Crazyflie’s path next to the tree.
Arnaud realized that, with all the autonomous work, we hardly fly the Crazyflie manually anymore. So he flew the Crazyflie manually. It required a bit more training that expected, but Crazyflie is really a fun (and safe!) quad to fly.
Marcus used two Lighthouse V2 base stations together with the Lighthouse deck and LED-ring deck. For the flying, he used the high level commander. The original plan was to fly around his gingerbread house, but unfortunately it was demolished before he got the chance (by some hungry elves surely!)
Kristoffer made his own tree ornament with the drone, which turned out to be a nice addition to a Christmas tree !
It was a fun way to use our own product, and to show off our decorated houses.
I hope you enjoy watching this video as much as we enjoyed making it.
We are staying open during the Holiday season but on a limited capacity: we still ship your orders, and will keep an eye on our emails and the forum, but things will get a bit slower here.
We wish you happy holidays and safe moments together with your loved ones.
It’s been more than 2 months since we decided, to preserve our health and the Swedish health care system, to work from home. Since then, the majority of the world has had to do the same, and as all of you, we had struggled to adjust to this new situation. What’s it like behind the curtain ?
The home setting
First things first: I’m not from the tech side of the company. Setting up my working environment was not difficult. I have my laptop, I plug it, and boom, I’m ready to work. I know that some of my colleagues had to get creative, setting up base stations in their summer house or in their kitchens.
My main problem setting up was dealing with comfort and distractions. Comfort means finding a good chair, and resist the temptation to just slouch on the couch – let’s be honest, maximum productivity is not achieved when the remote control is one arm’s length away.
Dealing with distractions is a whole another problem. My husband works remotely too. We’ve learned quite quickly that we can’t both work in the living room: collisions of video calls, or simply resisting the urge to chitchat together made it impossible. But the one major distraction that was impossible to ignore is 20 month-old and full of youthful energy. In Sweden, preschools are not closed, but every cold symptoms mean staying at home. It is perfectly reasonable, but we soon realized that having a toddler nearby is incompatible with working peacefully. As many parents have learned during the last couple of months, kids are a great way to lose your train of thoughts, to disrupt a video-call with inappropriate sentences or to simply disrupt any plan. As fun as it was to see how our daughter deal with the “no banging on the room’s door when mommy is working” rule, I feel incredibly lucky that we have a big enough apartment to be able to work in a separate room, and of course that she was able to have fun at the daycare while we could work from home.
A new routine
I have to say that I’m quite proud with the way we settled into this new routine. We meet each morning, setting up the goals of the day. We did that at the office too (see here), but where it lasted 10 minutes when we were all together all day, it can easily climb up to 45 minutes now. We tried to use new tools, and whether those worked or not (if you can tip on a good virtual whiteboard we’ll appreciate it!), in those two months we had time to experiment new ways of working. We tried to set up a quarterly meeting, (meaning a whole day of meeting) without a good quality webcam.. And managed it!
As the days turned into weeks, we realized that one big problem with our new setup meant that each day looked the same. This Groundhog day feeling made us lost count on our 3-week cycle and left the weekends with a strange, unsatisfying aftertaste. After all, now that I’m all the time at home, what’s the difference between a workday and a Saturday ? Well, I haven’t figure out a good solution yet.
It’s not all bad, though. I like that my new routine includes a big, often home-cooked lunch with my husband (I’m French, so of course my first thought is towards cooking !). And after the first weeks of minor stumble, the Bitcraze team is as productive as ever, with some exciting things coming soon. I have to admit too that I got used to listening to my own music while working, or that reducing the commute has allowed for some much appreciated 30 extra minutes of sleep.
And, last but not least, with the warm days returning, I started taking my laptop near the sunlit window, allowing for a great bask in the sun – what I often need to gather up energy.
My perfect spot near the window
Away but together
Each one of us had his struggle with remote work. For me, who has just started in the company, it was an unexpected challenge. I still have a lot of things to learn, and it’s easier when I can just tap on someone’s shoulder or quietly observe what they’re doing. Instead, I had to figure out quickly how to do things on my own. It meant making some mistakes, but eventually I’m convinced I’m now more efficient than if I had more relied on my colleagues – learning things the hard way is sometimes the best way.
If you are working from home too, you’ll understand when I say that the hardest part has been to keep up the motivation. At Bitcraze, we’re a tight-knit group, and I never realized before how much I rely on social interactions to keep me going. I’m a social animal, and my coworkers are always one of the most important part of my work. Helping them, seeing how they’re doing, sharing a ‘fika’ (Swedish coffeebreak) … I had no idea it was such a big chunk of my workplace well-being.
Thankfully, we’re now a digital tight-knit group. We have daily digital fikas to keep up with each other’s progress, and even though we could be more thorough with them, it helped with the loneliness.
As I noticed my motivation went usually down after my home-cooked lunch, a new resolution came forth: after lunch, exercise ! A great way to keep in shape and to resist the temptation of a quick nap. I’ll indeed gingerly admit that, with a comfy bed so close, it’s hard to not think about closing my eyes, just for one second… Getting the body moving and the heart rate up is the best solution I’ve found to avoid this trap, with the added benefit of not gaining too much weight during this strange period.
We also started having picnics when the weather allowed it. Respecting social distancing (each on its own blanket), it is a great way to reconnect, share a meal in the sun, and appreciate the great parks of Malmö.
A Bitcraze picnic
All in all, I’ve learned a lot during these months working from home. We’ve managed to tackle the hurdles in our way and found our stride with this new routine. Improvisation, creativity and adaptation were necessary, but I’m happy to report we didn’t lose our motivation and will to create great product !
New stock
Speaking of great products, we have renewed our stocks that were beginning to thin a little. The buzzer decks, for example, are back in stock !
