The new solution has a better match to the physical world and hopefully the estimated Z will be closer to zero when the Crazyflie is on the floor, with the “old” method, the solution sometimes is slightly tilted with a Z != 0 in some areas. When following a trajectory that is straight line through space, the Crazyflie should now actually fly on a fairly straight line, previously the flown path might be a bit curved. “Jumping” of the estimated position when one base station is occluded should be reduced. Secondly an improved estimation of the base station geometry (also when using 2 base stations) that generally reduces the errors and improves the position estimation of the Crazyflie when flying. It also makes it possible to set up multi-room systems to support flight from one room to another. Benefitsįirst of all, the functionality to use more than 2 base stations and the possibility to cover a larger flight space. This was the final part of the client UI that did not support 2+ base stations, and now remains only the possibility to run the new geometry estimation from the client. We have added some improvements to the client thought to enable it to display base station status for 2+ base stations. The base station geometry estimator still has to be run as a python script from the command line, and a reconfigured version of the Crazyflie firmware has to be built and flashed. Though the solution has been stabilized, it is still a bit experimental and it has not been fully integrated into the client yet. We have added a brief documentation to get you started. The solution has been improved since that blog post and we believe the functionality is now on a level where it works pretty well and can add value to most Lighthouse users.
There has been some background work going on related to the Lighthouse system, as mentioned in a previous blogpost.
IN the new release of the bitcraze VM this should be fixed, so please download the new one, or fix it yourself in your current VM by changing the remote URLs of the github repos you are working on to Crazyflie, Frontpage, Lighthouse, Random stuff, Software crazyflie, Release We were also made aware of a pretty big error in the bitcraze VM, namely that we still used the old git:// type url for github repositories. No worries, if you still prefer using the cfclient, it still uses the old way of estimating if you click the button, but just remember that you would need to do something extra in order to get 2+ base station support. This blogpost will explain more about this, and it is still experimental in nature, as you would need to reconfigure the firmware with… you guessed it: Kbuild! Also the geometry estimation needs to be done as a separate python script as well all from the Crazyflie python library. 2+ Lighthouse base stations (experimental)įor those that feel constrained by the max 2 lighthouse base station support in the firmware and client, this functionality is now part of the release.
For more information of how to add your own custom platform, please check out these instructions. Moreover, if you want to build the firmware to be Bolt compatible, you would first need to do ‘make bolt_defconfig’ to generate the needed configs with kbuild.
That means that for each release, there should now also be a bolt flavor zip file, next to the cf2 and tag zips, as you can see in the release page. We now defined the Bolt as a different platform. For more information, please read the blogpost about this latest change, for the exception that we do prefer the users to use ‘make cf2_config’ as instructed in the 2022.03 version of the repo documentation. The old config.mk is gone and you will now need to either automatically generate a config file or generate one with the menuconfig, of which kbuild is most known for.
One of the biggest changes that you will notice, is that there is now a new way to configure your Crazyflie firmware before building it. There is a new fresh release of both the firmware and the python library and client! The last release (2022.01) was from 2 months ago but we already added quite some extra functionality so we wanted to make a snapshot of this before continuing on other priorities.