Crazyflie Documentation

[antonio73]

Hi Crazyflie Team and enthusiasts,

I feel that, after a well deserved and successful landing on the market, now it would be the perfect time for the Crazyflie team to start to better address the field of documentation.
I understand that plenty of material is already around and this thanks to this forum and the contributions by many.
Unfortunately not all those who bought the CF are already experts of coding or developing. Despite this, many (including me) decided to buy anyway attracted by the concept of an open platform and from the opportunity to learn.
So, along with the very interesting discussions on improvements, new control laws, etc, I strongly encourage the Team not to forget about those newcomers to the world of drones and coding who need - at least at the beginning - a little more help on setting up the utilisation environment , the dev environment, on understanding which part does what, etc.. With this initial help they might better follow along the discussions become more willing to experiment or, on the other end, just convinced that all this is too complicated and give up... But having a choice is always good and I really think this is what makes the difference between participating in the Crazyflie project - as buyers of the drone and, thus, financiers of this cool firm - and buying a 30 $ piece which does pretty similar things but about which one can hardly learn something about the related fascinating world.
So, please, if you take my post as a constructive contribution (as it is meant to be), get back working also on the wiki pages because they need a lot of expansion, clarification and deepening. Maybe a youtube channel, with more videos, could be an easier and quicker approach. At present time, sad to say, youtube information is quite below expectations for such a sophisticated brilliant platform.
Thank you, kind regards,

Antonio

[tobias]

Hi Antonio,

First thing, thanks for your feedback!
Secondly, we also think documentation is lacking a lot and it is currently a high priority. You will start seeing lot of documentation appearing in the upcoming weeks, and we have already done plenty. It is however a bit overwhelming as there are so many systems/devices/OS currently supported so it is impossible for us to write everything and keep it up to date. That's where we try to reach out to the community and ask for help. So if there is anyone interested in contributing to the documentation just pm me or send us an email and we will setup a wiki account.

For us it would also be very good to know what the community would like us to prioritize in terms of documentation? Tutorials, technical descriptions, getting stated guides, etc.

[antonio73]

Ciao Tobias,

it's exactly as you say! "getting started guides, Tutorials, technical descriptions, etc." - in this order - is what I envision and recommend.
I found the "Motor RPM reading" post (the one on the main page of the Bitcraze site) very nicely done even though, some background information still seems to be required and/or much useful.
I trust that, with a little more time, this gap will be filled and plenty of basic-intermidiate level information will be available. Then I think it won't take too much effort to organize and categorize it in a more structured and easily accessible way (at the moment I find the wiki structure a bit hostile, with many links which need update or pages which are still under construction or already abandoned).

But, as you understand, I appreciate the dedication and effort you all are putting in tring to be of any help to all those who strive to learn, contribute or, just, understand the way the system works.
As a first succesful experiment of an open project of this complexity, I feel the least I can do is providing a user-related feedback so as to make your job even more outstanding and valuable.

Kind regards,

Antonio

[Call_me_a_Cab]

New guide here:

http://wiki.bitcraze.se/projects:virtua ... mware-win7

Hope it helps you

[CliffH]

I ran through the documentation. Mostly works great. Set default to off for the Neo-pixel, which I've been looking to do for some time.

Two issues:

1. Power off your CrazyFlie, and then power back on but holding the power switch until the “M2” LED starts to blink slowly.
>> Actually, on my Crazyflie, both M2 and M3 blink slowly. No biggie

2. Back in Eclipse, in the Make pane, click “flash using radio” (make sure it’s the copy project that we built earlier), You’ll see “M4” flash green during the process and then the CF will restart in “firmware mode” running your brand new custom firmware.
>>> This step generated an error. The only way I could get this to flash was to run the example in the main firmware, not the "Copy of..." project.

[Call_me_a_Cab]

Interesting,

Thanks for the feedback, I'll check it out tonight

[Call_me_a_Cab]

Cliff,

Could you post the error from the Eclipse console so I can try to reproduce please?

Cheers

[Slaxx]

Had the same error. Be careful that the copied project is in the same folder as the other project since some builder and stuff are also in this folder. Else you get a cload error...

However I would also be really happy to get some Introduction Documentation. I could install the Virtual Machine and also flash the Firmware, but now I stand in front of a lot of files and have no clue where I can find what and what I need to change etc.

[drnow]

I also have been VERY frustrated with the error generated by trying the example noted above. Following the documentation through the Make Target step "Make CLOAD", everything seems to work fine. But then, following the next step "Flash using radio" causes an error:

14:23:30 **** Build of configuration Build (GNU) for project Copy of crazyflie-firmware ****
make cload
../crazyflie-clients-python/bin/cfloader flash cflie.bin stm32-fw
make: ../crazyflie-clients-python/bin/cfloader: Command not found
Makefile:261: recipe for target 'cload' failed
make: *** [cload] Error 127


WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? AND, HOW DO I MOVE BEYOND THAT ERROR?

[Slaxx]

You probably copied it as it was expected in the tutorial. But you need to be careful that it is stored in the same main folder as the other projects since it uses libraries and other stuff. What you need to do is therefore just copy it again, but in the correct folder. Then it will also find the cload.