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Bitcraze Virtual Machine

This project contains scripts and templates to automatically create the Bitcraze VM with Packer. It's also used for tracking issues and improvements.

The Bitcraze VM contains everything you need for running the Bitcraze projects and doing development for them. It's a great way to quickly get started without having the hassle of installing dependencies and setting up the development environment.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of what's included:

  • Xubuntu 20.04 pre-configured
  • VirtualBox guest additions pre-installed
  • udev rules and pre-configured USB filtering for the Crazyradio and it's bootloader (NRF BOOT)
  • Most of our projects pre-cloned
  • QTCreator
  • Firefox
  • KiCad
  • vscode prepared for compiling/debugging/flashing the Crazyflie firmware
  • SDCC 3.2 for compiling of Crazyradio firmware

Downloading

The Bitcraze VM can be downloaded via the Github Release Page

Installing

The virtual appliance can be imported into VirtualBox. You will need the extention package of virtual box to be able to use the USB device. Go to Oracles download page to install both virtual box and the expansion pack.

It can be used with other virtual machine manager however setting up the guest addition might be required. The following have been tested

Using the virtual machine

After importing just run the machine. It logs in automatically but use the following credentials if needed:

User: bitcraze
Pass: crazyflie

Optimizing for Use

For faster USB connection with the Crazyradio PA it is advised to filter the USB device at startup of the VM. Go to settings->USB, make sure that USB 3.0 is enabled and add a USB device filter for the Crazyflie PA, which should be called 'Bitcraze Crazyradio PA USB Dongle [9955]'.

Also just to be sure, install the guest addition pack from inside the VM by typing: sudo apt-get install virtualbox-guest-additions-iso

For the rest of the performance of your VM, you can try to increase the base memory (Settings/System/Motherboard), the CPU's available (Settings/System/Processor), enable hardware acceleration and select Hyper-V (Settings/System/Acceleration) or increase the video memory with 3D acceleration enabled (Settings/Display/Screen). This requires some adjusting as this could be different per system you are running the VM from.

How to build the Bitcraze VM

Pre-requisites

  • This script has only been tested on a Linux machine, therefore it's recommended to use Linux to build the Bitcraze VM
  • VirtualBox must be installed as well as the VirtualBox Extension Pack
  • Virtual box guest additions
  • Packer (can be installed with apt install packer)

Local build

  1. Run createBitcrazeVM.sh
  2. Wait 40-60 minutes depending on machine and internet connection speed

What does createBitcrazeVM.sh do?

Run the two Packer templates * Create the VM and run a preseeded installation (bitcrazeVM_createVM.json) * Provision the VM (bitcrazeVM_provisionVM.json)

Why are there two packer templates?

To separate the VM creation and installation from the provisioning. If there is a problem during provisioning, the whole process does not have to start from scratch again. This saves a lot of time.

What do the packer templates do?

bitcrazeVM_createVM.json

  1. Download an ISO and create a VirtualBox image
  2. Start the so-called "preseeding", which automatically runs the Ubuntu installer
  3. Export VM image to OVA file

bitcrazeVM_provisionVM.json

Copy the files specified in the JSON template to the VM and run the provision.sh script so setup the image.

Help! Something does not work.

Please take a look at the log files packerlog_create.txt and packerlog_provision.txt.

Contribute

Go to the contribute page on our website to learn more.