Pair multiple Crazyflies using BLE?

Discussions and questions about the Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter
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danteppc
Beginner
Posts: 8
Joined: Tue Mar 09, 2021 9:41 am

Pair multiple Crazyflies using BLE?

Post by danteppc »

Hey!

Is it possible to pair two Crazyflie drones using BLE?

Consider a scenario where you want the drones control each other far way from the host.
arnaud
Bitcraze
Posts: 2538
Joined: Tue Feb 06, 2007 12:36 pm

Re: Pair multiple Crazyflies using BLE?

Post by arnaud »

Hi,

The Crazyflie comes with a bluetooth LE stack that can only work as a device, not as a host. This means that out of the box you cannot make one Crazyflie connect another one over BLE. It is possible to change the stack but that might require major work to port the nRF firmware and bootloader to the new stack and implement the host functionalities. To do so you will need to have the nRF debug adapter (part of the debug kit) soldered to the Crazyflie and a debugger attached to the nRF, this will allow you to change the bluetooth softdevice.

If bluetooth is not a requirement, you can achieve P2P communication with the Crazyflies using the existing P2P functionality: https://www.bitcraze.io/documentation/r ... s/p2p_api/. The functinality is pretty bare-bone but it allows to send and receive broadcast packets between multiple Crazyflie which can be use as a base for controlling the drone.

The best way forward would be to make an app (https://www.bitcraze.io/documentation/r ... app_layer/) that uses P2P packets and control the Crazyflie. There is a brunch of examples that shows how to use p2p packets and how to control the crazyflie from an app in the firmware repos: https://github.com/bitcraze/crazyflie-f ... r/examples
danteppc
Beginner
Posts: 8
Joined: Tue Mar 09, 2021 9:41 am

Re: Pair multiple Crazyflies using BLE?

Post by danteppc »

Thank you for your detailed answer
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