Developer meeting (22nd February 2023): Crazyradio 2.0

[knmcguire]

We will be having a Dev meeting about Crazyradio 2.0 on the 22nd of February. It will be about this blogpost coming out today.

Date: Wednesday 22nd February 2023
Time: 3 PM central European time
Meeting link: Meeting is finished!

Please give a thumbs up if you are planning to join! Click the smiley here under for the thumb

See here for the meeting minutes!

[knmcguire]

This blogpost also talked about this weeks dev meeting! https://www.bitcraze.io/2023/02/crazyflie-communication-stack-dev-meeting/ Here are the topics:

• Create a better USB radio dongle called Crazyradio 2.0.
• Develop a new radio protocol with improved communication capabilities.
• Create a new communication protocol to make it easier to develop and interface with other frameworks.
• Define an interface with other system parts to simplify deck development.
• Consider writing the Crazyflie library in Rust to simplify application development.

We can also handle some general support questions if we have time left over at the end of the hour

[knmcguire]

Meeting minutes Dev meeting 2023-02-22

Joining from Bitcraze: Kristoffer, Arnaud, Marcus, Kimberly
External: Finn Suberkrub, Matej Karasek

Presentation

• First 15 minutes: presentation about the commstack and some new ideas we want feedback on: Presentation slides

Slides for discussion

Discussion

• Finn: First comment about rewriting the communication stack on the PC pat in RUST, why not Julia?
  • Rust probably has a bigger community now that we saw at FOSdem ('Erode your project') so that is probably bettter
  • Matej mentioned that Julia is perhaps more of an Matlab replacement
• Matej: The current communication with the Crazyflie tends to be unstable as it sometimes just disconnects. Would want something that connects to many
  • Arnaud: The new version of the protocol that I have in mind will do channel hopping, but the Crazyradio2 that will soon come out will still only have the old protocol which most likely still have the same issue
  • Kimberly: Some of the projects like Crazyswarm2 or Skybrush will have ways to reconnect after losing connections, as sort of a patch around the current problem, so there are ways to solve that with the current Crazyradio
• Matej: The new protocol that you have in mind, will it be relatively easy to implement this new one on the multiprotocol transmitter that I'm using now with the flapper drone? Can I reuse the old one?
  • Arnaud: Once the new protocol is there. this will need to be re-implemented, but the plan is that the api for that should be much easier than it would have been with the old protocol due to the nature of RPCs. But we will not break compatibility with the old protocol overnight, so we make sure to do that properly in more of a range of 5 years
  • Kimberly: It would be interesting to keep this compatibility with direct communication receivers. We have seen already how handy this was for us at conferences with the Steamdeck
• Finn: I've made my own communication with the crazyflie through ESPnow and a julia based client (Arnaud is interested 😄 )

General Support questions

• Finn: I was wondering about position controller. Would it be possible to make the Crazyflie fly without any positioning system
  • Kimberly: It will always drift away. You could make use of the multiranger to either do localization or stay clear of the walls, but it would be much easier to use the flowdeck
  • Arnaud: There are some research done with TOF with bluetooth, but that's very hard
  • Matej: The flapper drone is able to hover more still but that is due to drag. In the end it will always drift
• Matej: I've noticed with my latest Demo, that the crazyflie or flapper drone sometimes freaks out a bit with the lighthouse system. Why is that?
  • Kristoffer: I think it is mostly due to reflections, so that is perhaps something to look at. We have no support of handling that in the crazyflie firmware right now unfortunately
• Matej: I've noticed that sometimes the crazyflie hits an assert with the lighthouse deck when it is on for 15 minutes (not flying), it is difficult to recreate it
  • Kristoffer: You can still make an issue eventhough it is not easy to recreate the situation. Just give a general description of the problem and you can add more information later. To create an issue on github will ensure that other people are aware of it as well.