thank you for your help.zak wrote:This is a bit sad! I'm using a Macbook to fly right now, but through a virtual machine. Although they sound scary, they're pretty easy to get going (honest!). I'll try to give a quick step-by-step. I'm going to assume you can use Bittorrent to download files - if you can't or are confused by what I mean, just do the first step only and I'll give separate instructions for doing it a different way.dwaddsy wrote:I cannot believe that NOBODY has been able to fly a CF on a macbook.....wtf.....
Good luck! I'm sorry if I've left anything out - I've tried my best to lead you through the steps I took to get flying but I may well have left something out. Please feel free to post back here and ask any questions.
- Download and install VirtualBox. You'll need the version for OS X hosts (for you, OS X will be the 'host' operating system while Linux will be the 'guest'). While you're there, get the extension pack too - once you've installed VirtualBox, double-clicking on the extension package and you'll be prompted to install it.
- Next, you'll need to get hold of your guest OS. As I mentioned before, we'll use the Bitcraze VM as this has everything installed for you already.
- Double click on the downloaded Bitcraze VM file. VirtualBox will unpack the guest OS and it will appear in your list of virtual machines.
- Next, we need to give your virtual machine access to the Crazyradio and your controller. Connect them both to your Macbook, highlight Ubuntu Bitcraze in VirtualBox and click the Settings button. Under the Ports tab, select USB and click the green plus. Choose the Crazyradio dongle, then click the button again and choose your Xbox controller (see attached image). Once you've done this, disconnect the controller. This is to get around the host OS (OS X) holding onto the controller and stopping the guest OS from accessing it.
- Start the virtual machine! It will appear in a window on your Macbook - if you want it to be full-screen, use the shortcut command+F.
- The Bitcraze VM is a bit out of date. Open terminal (on the desktop of the virtual machine), and type 'cd projects/crazyflie-pc-client' followed by 'hg pull && hg update'. This will update your client to the latest version.
- Plug in your controller, turn on your Crazyflie and start the client with the command 'python bin/cfclient'. Everything should start up and you will see the connect button in the top-left of the client window.
- You should see an entry that starts with the word 'radio'. Connect to this one, and you should be connected to your flie - check by moving the flie around and seeing if the horizon moves.
- Now, unfortunately, is the bit I can't help you with - I fly with a wired PS3 controller rather than a wireless XBox one. Hopefully at the bottom of your client it will be telling you that you're using a controller rather than something like 'VirtualBox USB Tablet'. Hopefully someone using a wireless XBox controller inside a virtual machine can chime in here.
I got stuck on 6. I typed that into the terminal and it from what it looked like it didn't give me errors. I moved onto 7 but I got stuck so I closed everything down and when I opened everything back up again the program shows that it has a lot of updates. What does this mean? does this mean that the terminal command did not work?
I tried to move onto 7. and typed in the command and I was able to see horizon etc but it was non responsive to my crazyflie. I then shut everything down to take a break and when I came back to everything I was unable to find a way to open this window with the horizon again. I even tried typing in python bin/cfclient into the terminal but this time it just gave me an error message.
Wow I had no idea what I was getting into. This CF seems to be best left for the professional programmers =( Can anyone help a laymen here?