Swarm Control Tower

A real-time 3D visualization and control application for Crazyflie drone swarms. It uses a Crazyradio in sniffer mode to listen to P2P broadcast packets from a decentralized swarm and displays each drone's position, state, battery level, and signal strength in an interactive 3D view.

Features

• 3D Visualization -- Interactive OpenGL viewport showing drone positions, flight trails, goto targets, and drop lines for depth perception
• Swarm Monitoring -- Live state, battery voltage, and RSSI for up to 10 drones
• Flight Control -- Buttons to set the number of drones that should fly (+, -, All, None) with a force-takeoff override
• Lighthouse Integration -- Displays Lighthouse base station positions loaded from calibration geometry
• Configurable Camera -- Orbit, pan, and zoom with mouse controls
• Wand Support -- Visualizes wand position and pointing direction from wand P2P packets

Prerequisites

• Rust toolchain (edition 2021)
• A Crazyradio USB dongle
• OpenGL ES 2.0 capable system
• USB permissions for the Crazyradio (on Linux, udev rules)

Setup

1. Install Rust

If you don't have Rust installed:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv8 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
source ~/.cargo/env

2. USB permissions (Linux)

Allow your user to access the Crazyradio without root. You only need to do this once:

echo 'SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="1915", ATTRS{idProduct}=="7777", MODE="0664", GROUP="plugdev"' | sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/99-crazyradio.rules
sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm trigger

Then unplug and replug the Crazyradio dongle.

3. Crazyradio firmware

Requires Crazyradio 2.0 firmware 5.4 or later.

Follow the getting started guide to flash the firmware to your Crazyradio 2.0.

4. Build

cargo build --release

5. Run

# Default: channel 80, 2M datarate, address E7E7E7E7E7
cargo run --release

# Custom radio settings
cargo run --release -- --radio 0 --channel 90 --address FFE7E7E7E7

Command-line options

Option	Short	Default	Description
--radio <N>	-r	0	Crazyradio device index
--channel <N>	-c	80	Radio channel (0-125)
--datarate <RATE>	-d	2M	Data rate: 250K, 1M, or 2M
--address <HEX>	-a	E7E7E7E7E7	5-byte radio address in hex

Configuration

config.toml

The runtime configuration file defines the Lighthouse geometry file and the active flight area boundaries:

lighthouse_geometry = "Lighthouse_Cage.yaml"

[active_area]
min_x = -1.36
max_x = 1.72
min_y = -1.66
max_y = 1.35

Lighthouse geometry

The Lighthouse_Cage.yaml file contains Lighthouse base station calibration data including sweep parameters and origin positions. This is the same format used by the Crazyflie Python client.

Controls

Left panel

• + / - -- Increase or decrease the number of drones that should fly
• All / None -- Request all or no drones to fly
• Force takeoff -- Override low-battery takeoff protection
• Click a drone in the list to select it and show its flight trail

3D viewport

• Left-drag -- Orbit camera (yaw/pitch)
• Right-drag -- Pan camera
• Scroll wheel -- Zoom in/out
• Right-click -- Context menu with display toggles (labels, grid, axes, Lighthouse stations)

Architecture

Module	Purpose
main.rs	Application entry point, UI setup, radio thread, frame updates
protocol.rs	P2P packet parsing/building matching the decentralized swarm firmware protocol
renderer.rs	OpenGL 3D rendering engine (ground grid, drones, trails, base stations)
config.rs	TOML/YAML configuration loading
ui/app.slint	UI layout using the Slint framework

The application runs two threads: the main thread drives the Slint UI event loop, while a background Tokio async task handles Crazyradio sniffer I/O and packet parsing. They communicate through Arc<Mutex<SharedState>>.