Crazyflie development virtual machine

[arnaud]

Hi,

As said in the last blog post we are currently making a virtual machine that would contain all required software to start using and developing the Crazyflie and Crazyradio. Basically it is an Ubuntu system that can be run inside Virtualbox in parallel of the machine operating system (Virtualbox runs on Windows, Linux and Mac). It is a quick and easy way to get everything up and running.

So far we are thinking of putting the following in the image:
- Pre-fetched projects source code and tools to fetch the last version (Mercurial, TortoiseHG)
- Crazyflie development toolchain (GCC/make/OpenOCD)
- Radio development toolchain (sdcc/make)
- Python and libs to run and develop the PC client (Python, Pygame, Pyqt4, PyUSB with good udev rules, pyFlake, pyLint, ...)
- QT development tools (qtdesigner)
- Pre-configured Eclipse for Crazyflie firmware development
- Hardware development tools (Freecad/KiCAD)

Do you have any more ideas of what we should put in the image?

[DesTinY]

Maybe instructions and examples to use the tools.
Please explain there how to pull/push commits from/in the Repo. and how to bring changes on the CF step by step.
The key that everyone can use it and start development is self declaration (A picture is worth a thousand words).

BTW: Very good idea to share a ready development environment as VM! *thumbs up*

[mikevoyt]

What are you using for the Python IDE? If you're going to include Eclipse pre-configured with C/C++ support, maybe you could also pre-configure it for Python development, i.e., with PyDev?

Great idea regarding the virtual machine - I've spent some time getting everything up and running (cfclient, firmware builds, etc) under OS X; it took some effort and is pretty much working now, except one of the axis on the joystick isn't working quite properly...

-mike

[arnaud]

For the documentation the main part is still planed to stay on the wiki, and we have to improve it even further. But of course the VM will contains at least couple of README files that explain how to get started and the rest should be pre-configured so that it is easy to use.

For Python we are currently mainly using Gedit but pyDev is a good idea and it will be a good occasion for us to try it.

@mikevoyt: I would be very interested to know how you got cfclient to work on OSX, I am not at all used to it and when I tried (for only 2 hours I have to admit, none of us have a mac so I had to borrow one) I never managed to get PyQT4 and Pygame to work together (it seems that I had PyQT 64bit libraries and Pygame 32Bit).

[mikevoyt]

Hi arnaud,

I've been taking some notes on what I've been doing with Crazyflie; you can find them here:

http://crazyflie.blogspot.com/

In particular, getting cfclient working on OS X can be found here:

http://crazyflie.blogspot.com/2013/02/s ... -os-x.html


Note that I used the "Lion apple supplied python" binary (pygame-1.9.2pre-py2.7-macosx10.7.mpkg.zip) for Pygame - maybe that's the difference?

-mike

[marcus]

Nice work Mike! Is it ok if we put some of these instructions on our wiki?

[mikevoyt]

Hi marcus - of course, feel free to use whatever you think would be helpful!

-mike

[mrb0y]

I'm post poning setting up anything because now I'm waiting for the VM image! Great use of technology by the way. It will make things so much easier.

[mrb0y]

How difficult would it be to add HIL (hardwarre in the loop) simulation to the set of tools. If it's all open source why not add it in?

[arnaud]

Hardware in the loop would be very cool to have and very useful for development (qemu in the loop would be nice as well for development . I see at least two things we miss to make it possible though: fast comminication with the copter (USB has been tested but never finalized) and a simulation of the copter (in flight gears or x-plane?). If this two things are done it would become fairly easy to make a HIL with Crazyflie.