Vive Trackers can be used to track artibitrary objects with high precision using the SteamVR Lighthouse system. The downside of these devices are that they are rather bulky and require a computer to track the devices.

Bitcraze have developed a lightweight Lighthouse Deck for their Crazyflie drones which enables them to determine their position autonomously. Wouldn't it be great to use this device to let objects determine their position with high precision indepently?

Luckily, the deck has been released with an GNU GPL v3.0 license so we can reuse everything to develop such a generic tracking solution.

First steps

I managed to get the lighthouse deck working using an ESP32:

Base Station position estimation

Next is to determine the lighthouse base station poses from the lighthouse tracker. I have written a description of the algorithm for this.

The code

The code is available with a GNU GPL 3.0 license on my GitLab server.