Receiving other Bluetooth signals (firmware side)

[jonaspriest]

Hello together,

to achieve positioning/localization with the Crazyflie, me and my project group from university want to use the signals of 5-6 iBeacons now (which send out Bluetooth LE signals) to calculate the drones position by using trilateration.

The first thing we have to do for that is obviously receiving the bluetooth signals from the iBeacons on the drone/firmware side while having it also connected to the PC.
So our questions:

- Can you actually do both parallelly? Being connected to a client and receiving the signals of iBeacons?
- How could we achieve that?
- Do you know about any projects doing that? Especially projects using the crazyflie?

We hope that someone has cool information for us, thank you very much!

[arnaud]

Hi, interesting project!

Answers:
- Yes it can run in parallel, currently BLE and ESB(Crazyradio) is running at the same time. It works by time-slotting. You might have to implement your own time slot (the easiest might be to keep the current architecture and to switch between observer and ESB timestlots).
- You will have to implement an "observer" mode. Nordic has an example for that: https://github.com/NordicSemiconductor/ ... advertiser. Basically you need to configure the radio to be compatible with Bluetooth and receive the packets
- I have no knowledge of anyone that has done it with the Crazyflie. I made some experimental bluetooth stack on the nrf so I can help if you have question on setting-up the radio.

Good luck,

[jonaspriest]

Hi,

thank you for your nice answer. That is also interesting, although I think you understood me wrong or I explained it confusing.

We want the Crazyflie to receive BLE signals of the iBeacons. It should calculate its position by the principle of trilateration from the RSSI of the beacons OR we provide the raw data through the logging framework and let it be calculated client side?! Both could work I guess.

The Crazyflie should of course be controlled from a computer/client while being connected with the Crazyradio. So the Crazyradio should not do additional work, we don't want to touch that.

We just need to be sure that the Crazyflie can be controlled and receive iBeacons signals parallely and how we can access the iBeacons signals on the Crazyflie/firmware-side. I hope it's more clear now and also created a small diagram to the attachment.

Thanks for your time