Combined flow deck and LED ring

[r-bt]

I have a swarm of crazyflies which I'm localizing with the Lighthouse system. Additionally, each Crazyflie has an LED ring to display state information as colour. I've found the lighthouse measurements to be occasionally noisy (especially in the Z direction) and was thinking it might be possible to use both a flow-deck and lighthouse deck to better stabilize the drone. However, as both the flow-deck and LED ring need to be on the bottom this won't work as is. As the electronics files are not available I can't do this myself, so I wanted to just share the idea here and say it'd be useful for my case.

[ArisMorgens]

Hello @r-bt !

Displaying each Crazyflie's state information as color sounds really interesting!

From my experience, if there's a good Lighthouse configuration, the measurements are not noisy at all, and adding a Flow deck doesn't make the performance noticeable better. So, I would first try to get more accurate positioning data from the Lighthouse system by making the conditions better (maybe changing the position of the base stations or removing reflective objects from the area).

However, you're free to try flying with both Lighthouse and Flow deck attached and please update us if you find it to be more stable.

Regarding the LED-ring + Flow deck combination, we had a "hackish" solution where you drill holes on the LED-ring's PCB for both the optical and the ranging sensor. For that, you have to sacrifice the "headlights" of the deck and you might also need to make some firmware modifications. You can find a more detailed description here. This isn’t something we recommend, but if you feel it’s the right approach, we can discuss more details.

[r-bt]

Hi @ArisMorgens

Thanks for the quick reply and sharing the "hackish" link. Hearing that the lighthouse measurements shouldn't be so noisy, I'll try fix that first before potentially making the LED deck adjustments. Perhaps I'll make a new thread for the lighthouse issue then, as I've tried multiple base stations location configurations and in all, at least one of my Crazyflies would eventually start drifting upwards

[ArisMorgens]

Hello @r-bt!

This sounds like a good plan. Good luck with your project!