How to use the VM on OS X and VirtualBox

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qubitter
Beginner
Posts: 28
Joined: Wed Mar 11, 2015 8:47 pm

How to use the VM on OS X and VirtualBox

Post by qubitter »

Ok, so this is how to use the VM on OS X because VMWare isn't on Mac. :-(

The first thing you have to do is get the latest version of VirtualBox from http://www.virtualbox.org/ After, you should also download the VirtualBox Extension Pack from right below where you download VirtualBox.

Ok. Here we go...

Open VirtualBox and go to File>Import Appliance. Navigate to wherever you have the Bitcraze VM. Open it and you will see a settings page. Don't touch anything. Just click next until it starts importing the appliance. It will take a few minutes, so get yourself a snack and get ready.

Once it is finished importing the appliance, double-click on it. I should open. :| If it doesn't( :o ), go back and read the instructions again.

After waiting a little bit, you should see a picture of the Crazyflie as your home screen. Congrats! You're almost done.

Now then, the first thing that you should do is click on the icon labeled: Update All Projects. It will run a terminal script and the end of which it will say: Press any key to exit. Hit any key and voila! All projects are now at their latest versions.

Lastly, you will want to edit the code a little. This next bit is actually copied from the tutorial for WIndows, but I did it just fine on Yosemite, so it will work.

The upper left pane is the project pane, select the project called “crazyflie-firmware” and right click and copy it, then paste a copy back to the project pane to end up with a new project called “copy of crazyflie-firmware”

We’re going to use this copied project to “mess” around with just in case we make a typo or mess it up some other way, that way at least we still have the original.

Click on the arrow to expand the project and have a look around, read the readme file.

Now let’s make that change to the LED ring. In the copied project folder navigate to “modules/src” and open the “neopixelring.c” file. This is the firmware that controls the LED expansion ring.

As with nearly all microcontroller code, this is written in the C programming language.

Sometimes eclipse collapses the first comments section of the code, in the code pane, at the top click the little “+” to expand if needed.

Now, ignoring the first comments part encased between “/*” and “*/”,scroll down to the first parts of the code to find the includes, these tell the code that some stuff it needs to run is found within other code files. They’re not really relevant to this guide so we’ll skip past them for now.

Scrolling down we find some defines. These are macros to create shorthand for code that will be use a lot to save typing everything repeatedly. Skip these also for now.

Next we find some static functions, this is where we will make our modest change.

At time of writing on line 77 you'll find “static uint32_t effect = 9;”. This is where the default effect is set.

Go ahead and change the “9” to “0” to enable the 0 effect as default.

Click save in eclipse and it’s done.

Ok, back to the original stuff. ;

I'm not actually sure exactly how to do this part seeing as I don't have my Crazyflie 2 yet, but rest assured. Once I get it, my top priority will be to tell you guys. So there you go! You now have the Bitcraze VM running.

Good luck!
arnaud
Bitcraze
Posts: 2538
Joined: Tue Feb 06, 2007 12:36 pm

Re: How to use the VM on OS X and VirtualBox

Post by arnaud »

Thanks for the doc!
qubitter wrote: Sun Mar 15, 2015 11:51 pm Ok, so this is how to use the VM on OS X because VMWare isn't on Mac. :-(
Why would you want to use VMWare for the Bitcraze VM anyway? The VM has been reported to work on VMWare but it is generated by and for Virtual Box primarily. Do we have any documentation anywhere that says otherwise?
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