Recently, I got a Crazyflie. As I also own two Zeemote JS1 remote controls, using these for controlling the Crazyflie suggested itself to me.

In a previous post, I introduced QZeeControl 2 which enables using Zeemote remote controls, e.g., on Linux Desktop systems. In fact, the main motivation for writing QZeeControl 2 was to control the Crazyflie via the Zeemotes. In this post, I briefly demonstrate how controlling the Crazyflie using the Zeemotes works.

In a nutshell, QZeeControl 2 creates a joystick input device via uinput that can then be used in the Crazyflie PC client application. In the video below, the basic interaction with the Crazyflie application is shown.

So far, I had been flying only a few times but it seems that controlling the Crazyflie this way really works well. Right now, I need to practice more. Hopefully, I can post a video of the actual Crazyflie being flown with the Zeemotes in future.

Also note that I use two Zeemotes because I want to control thrust, yaw, pitch, and roll via the joysticks and thus need four via joystick controllable axes. In other configurations, e.g., with automatic altitude control it could be sufficient to just use a single Zeemote.