Bitcraze Forums

Hi,

Noob here. I have a strange issue that my crazyflie 2.1 with a bigquad deck seems to lose connectivity very easily. I am not sure why this is happening, but I wanted to test an external antenna and see if that would solve the issue.

I found this https://wiki.bitcraze.io/projects:crazy ... nalantenna

However, I have no idea how to go about changing these things. I can download this repo, add things to pm.c, but how do I go about uploading it to the drone? Physically, what do I have to do? Can I just use the radio to change the radio firmware? I believe no. So do I need an USB cable, just plug it to the drone and that's it? Or do I need to buy hardware (somewhere in the readme files it mentions a STLink-V2) and figure out where to connect pins myself?

Or do I need to de-solder things?

TY,
fred.

Hi,

Yes you can use the radio to change the radio firmware, there is a bootloader in both CPU containted in the Crazyflie that is enabled by pressing the ON switch until the back left blue LED blinks when starting the Crazyflie. If both blue LEDs blinks, Crazyflie is in bootloader mode. The bootloader is "safe" in the sense that it always executes before the firmware and so even if you flash a buggy firmware, you can always start the bootloader and flash a firmware again.

How to compile the firmware depends a lot of what OS you are running. On all OS you can use the VM we have built, on Windows this is the only option.

On mac and linux you need make, python and Gnu-arm-embeded toolchain. You need to get version 8-2019-q3-update if you also want to work on the Crazyflie firmware as version 9 cannot compile the Crazyflie firmware yet (both should work for the radio).

Once you have the toolchain, either in the VM or on your system, you can build and bootload your new firmware, to type in a terminal in the project folder: