Microcontroller usage for flight and stabilization.

[Yaro]

Hi all,

I've found this about microcontroller used in Crazyflie 1.0

"The STM32F103CB MCU we run at full speed, 70Mhz.. ..We use about 40% of its processing power (with a stabilization update loop at 500Hz) and a big chunk of this is because we use a “blocking” I2C driver."

I'm interesed with the new MCU used in Crazyflie 2.0 and new firmware how much processing power it's used? (each for stabilization and for data trasmission)

Thank you!

[marcus]

Hi Yaro,

For the Crazyflie 2.0 we use very little of the power in the STM32F4, I would guess 10%. And that's without enabling the FPU. For the nRF51 I'm not sure about the measurement, but it's ticker since the Bluetooth LE stack has very strict timing requirements.

[whoenig]

Hi Marcus,
just out of curiosity: How do you measure the utilization in practice?

[marcus]

I didn't do the measurement, but if I remember correctly we use the functionality in FreeRTOS to measure the time each task uses (including IDLE). This will not take time spent in interrupts into account though.