Learning the firmware

[cmcarroll]

Hi Chad,

Do you know where there are instructions to update to Python 3? I haven't been able to find how to do that on the VM specifically. Thank you for your helpfullness and patience!

[chad]

Might be installed already?
http://askubuntu.com/questions//how-to- ... -on-ubuntu

If not, you have to use apt-get. I don't recall the package name... Maybe:

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sudo apt-get install python34

?

Or, upgrade your Ubuntu install with software updater maybe.

[cmcarroll]

My VM says it has python3 already installed. Yet, my cfclient still won't open, which is strange. I'm going to play around and hopefully get an answer.

[chad]

My VM says it has python3 already installed. Yet, my cfclient still won't open, which is strange. I'm going to play around and hopefully get an answer.

If you double-click the icon on the Desktop it surely won't work. It's simply a launcher. If, however, you run it directly in the Terminal with:

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cd ~/projects/crazyflie-clients-python
python3 ./bin/cfclient

It errors out because no pyusb is installed. That leads me to believe that pyusb (and possibly other dependencies for Python 3) aren't installed.

At this point, you're going to have to deal with getting all the dependencies for Python 3. Until Bitcraze revs the VM, I think it's probably just easier to install everything on your Mac and go from there.

[cmcarroll]

Yeah, I suppose I will have to. That's frustrating because I was just getting the hang of the VM, but I'll just have to deal with it! Thanks for your help. Is it possible to let the developers know of this issue?

[chad]

Well, you could always try to get the VM updated. The dependencies are listed in the README of the crazyflie-clients-python repo. I'm just lazy and would rather take the quick and easy way out.

I created an issue in the GitHub repo for the bitcraze-vm after our conversation. You're free to comment on it if you want.

Happy to help!

[cmcarroll]

I was just about to update my last post, but you were too quick to respond! Updating the dependencies AND ubunutu on the VM fixed my issue. So now I can go back to trying to understand the firmware and write my own code to get a single motor to turn on... Thanks, you're so helpful and so patient with my extreme beginner questions. (I probably wouldn't be so active in the forum if this was just for fun, but I have a HUGE graded assignment riding on my ability to get my CF1 project working how I want it to ha!)

[chad]

I was just about to update my last post, but you were too quick to respond! Updating the dependencies AND ubunutu on the VM fixed my issue. So now I can go back to trying to understand the firmware and write my own code to get a single motor to turn on...

Good to hear it!! It looks like they've rev'd the VM (to 0.8) now to update and fix the problem. So, after all that work, you can just download a new VM now. At least you learned a lot!

Thanks, you're so helpful and so patient with my extreme beginner questions. (I probably wouldn't be so active in the forum if this was just for fun, but I have a HUGE graded assignment riding on my ability to get my CF1 project working how I want it to ha!)

You're welcome!! I'm active in this forum because it is just for fun for me. Incidentally, I'm curious what class you're doing this for. So is Bitcraze actually (see the second paragraph at that link). It's too bad to read you'll not be active in the forum when you've gotten the A+ on your project...