Bitcraze Forums

Hi! The thing is I've only taken introductory programming courses, so I'm not really sure where/how to start. I know this may not be the best way to learn about programming for hardware, but I'm willing to put in the effort. So far, we've finished setting everything up, gotten the Crazyflie to fly, and we've been trying the hover mode that's currently being worked on. However, it would be really cool to try to write a program of our own.

Would it be too difficult for someone of my skill level to program the Crazyflie to execute simple movements? Maybe just have it fly up for a predetermined amount of time and then go down for a predetermined amount of time? Turn left after traveling a certain amount of distance? Anything really.

I would love advice as to what type of programs would be possible for someone of my skill level to write and how I would begin to go about that. It seems like everybody here is very experienced, so I haven't been able to find much of the basics or how to start after reading the forum and wiki.

Hi alate,

We know the Crazyflie platform is a bit complicated right now, which we really would like to change! It is just very hard as the development goes very fast, which often tend to increase complexity and documentation falls behind. Also since it is flying it doesn't make things easier. Right now my only advice is to play around with it and to find fun areas to start digging in to.

As it doesn't know its absolute position it can't take commands such as, go up 1m, go left 2m etc. It could however take commands such as, apply 60% thrust, set pitch to +5 deg, set pitch to 0 deg, apply thrust 40% etc. That would give different outcome each time though and might result in a lot of crashes...

Have fun and I hope you learn a lot from it!

Thank you very much for the reply and for the advice. It was very helpful.

Since my last post, we've been working with those commands that you mentioned after seeing the sample code in the wiki, and we noticed the same problems you pointed out. We were looking into logging variables so that we can hopefully use values from the gyrometer or altimeter, for example, to make the individual outcomes more consistent and minimize crashes. We're not completely sure about the feasibility of this though. Also, from reading another thread, it looks like the only values for logging are the thrust, yaw, roll, pitch, motor gain and pm.vbat?

Anyways, I know we can't do anything particularly precise as we do not have a GPS, but we're hoping that we can at least still get the Crazyflie to fly with some level of stability with our Python script.

alate wrote:Also, from reading another thread, it looks like the only values for logging are the thrust, yaw, roll, pitch, motor gain and pm.vbat?

Currently those are the values that can be logged, but more can be added. To see how this is done have a look at the API documentation on the wiki.