Lighthouse positioning deck - Bitcraze

With the Lighthouse positioning deck, high-precision autonomous flight becomes accessible to everyone. The Lighthouse deck uses HTC Vive bases (also known as Lighthouse V1) or SteamVR Base Station 2.0 (also known as Lighthouse V2) to achieve high-precision localization. The board is equipped with 4 receivers that provide full Crazyflie pose.

Position and laying are calculated directly on board the Crazyflie, making it possible to create fully autonomous systems without external communication.

On-board position calculation and low complexity make it an ideal choice for any environment, from large laboratories to small classrooms.

Features

• High-precision positioning
• Compatible with HTC Vive Base Station and SteamVR Base Station 2.0
• Onboard FPGA for signal processing with toolchain open source
• UART and I2C communication via Crazyflie expansion port
• UART pads available to solder a 2.54 mm connector for connection to external systems, e.g. Arduino
• UART and I2C bootloader for programming FPGA configuration

Use

Go to the introductory tutorial of the Lighthouse positioning system.
For more general information on how the Crazyflie fits into positioning systems, go to the Positioning Systems overview.

Development

Firmware Implementation.
All localization via Lighthouse is estimated on board the Crazyflie. See the technical documentation for the Lighthouse Positioning System to understand how it is implemented in the Crazyflie's firmware.

It is important to have a good understanding of the Crazyflie's stabilizer module, particularly the state estimation via the Extended Kalman Filter.

Hardware Hack: Using an LH deck with other hardware.
The board has 4 solder pads on the bottom designed to allow use of the Lighthouse positioning deck with other hardware. The 4 pads are labeled and correspond to the P3 connector in the board schematic.

The GND and VCOM pads can be used to supply power to the board. There is a 3.0V LDO regulator on the board, which means that VCOM can be in the range of about 3.3V-5.5V.

RX and TX are connected directly to the iCE40LP5K FPGA. The FPGA is quite sensitive and the maximum voltage that can be applied to these pins is 3.2V; applying a higher voltage will damage the FPGA. This makes the board incompatible with 3.3V systems "out of the box," but adding a voltage divider before RX and making sure there is never a pull-up on TX is enough to interface the board with a 3.3V system.

The board boots in bootloader mode; the external system is responsible for updating the bitstream, if necessary, and booting the board via the serial port.

Note: there is no software support for using the Lighthouse positioning deck with other hardware

Package contains: 1 x Lighthouse positioning deck - Bitcraze