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First crazyflie production prototype ordered

After spending a lot of time with KiCad we finally finished the first production prototype. Our earlier version we created in Eagle CAD but since we now wanted to do a 4 layer board and use a free and preferably  open source tool our choice of KiCad was pretty easy.  However it was not without problems. E.g. making a custom curvature pcb shape as ours wasn’t easy and took a lot of fiddling to get right. But now it’s ready for testing and has been sent for production. We will make 5 pieces first to test and verify and hopefully we won’t find any big mistakes.

As soon as we get the boards we will post some pictures but for now a simple 3D model of the board have to suffice.

/The crazyflie team

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 23rd, 2011 at 19:47 and is filed under Crazy Flie, CrazyCopter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

11 Responses to “First crazyflie production prototype ordered”

  1. moritzz06 says:
    2011-10-23 at 22:40

    Looks good, but isn’t the frame too thin? And how would you attach the motor on it?
    Have you messured the thrust of it?

    Greetings and good luck,
    moritzz

  2. Bernd says:
    2011-10-24 at 09:51

    This project sound really interesting.

    Will it actually be possible to program the quadcopter? I am currently looking for something like that which can be programmed in C

    Cheers,
    Bernd

  3. arnaud says:
    2011-10-24 at 10:18

    @moritzz06: For the frame that is something we have to test with this prototype but it is the same thickness as for the first crazyflie and we never had problem with it. We are still working on the motor fastening and for the thrust measurement we will need to have everything mounted with motor and propeller to test it.

    @Bernd Yes it will be possible to program it and it is written in C using FreeRTOS. The software will be released under an open-source license and there is a JTAG connector on it. The copter can also be programmed using the radio bootloader (over the air update ;-) , not in flight though…).

  4. BOS says:
    2011-10-24 at 16:53

    I was looking at this and thought, “someone should adapt on of those powermat wireless chargers to the bottom of it” i mean you could program it to fly around on its own until power gets to, say 25%, and then return to its station until the battery’s full again. as im not technically minded enough to do so, i hope someone who is reads this and tries it :D

  5. Adam says:
    2011-10-25 at 06:27

    I have been interested in this project for a while now and I’m glad to see the progress. I myself have just completed building my first quadcopter and I have always thought it would be interesting to design a micro version on a single pcb with coreless motors. Are you planning to open source all aspects of the design or just the programming? As a first year electrical engineering undergraduate I only have basic self-taught knowledge of pcb designing but I have considered attempting to miniaturize a variant of the kk board for which the schematics can be found online; however, I haven’t enough programming experience or miniature surface-mount soldering skills to complete the build and include an integrated 2.4gHz radio system on the board. Anyhow, best of luck to you, I look forward to seeing your continued progress.

  6. Bernd says:
    2011-10-25 at 08:17

    Cool! I am currently working on a research project which aims to develop domain specific languages on top of C (http://mbeddr.com) This, btw, will be open source soon as well. For the project I am currently looking for a quadcopter to experiment with. Your one might be just the right size (I want something which I can fly indoors). Do you have any timeframe until it will be ready? If you are interested in the project, we can maybe as well do something together…
    Cheers,
    Bernd

  7. Meriç says:
    2011-10-25 at 13:40

    I am a student in electric electronic engineering at METU. I am chairman in IEEE Robotics and Automation Society at METU. We are waiting for your final documents of your project posted so that we can start our project on this application. We wonder how long it takes to post the all information about quadrocopter to wiki?

  8. tobias says:
    2011-10-25 at 16:59

    @Meric
    Well, we are working as much and fast as we can but we don’t want to tell any date and promise something we can’t hold. Now when most of the hardware is finished we are shifting to software development and documentation and hopefully well have something in a couple of month, but it can be earlier or later.
    It’s nice to hear that you are planning to do something with the crazyflie, that’s the intention of it :-) .

  9. Bobby says:
    2011-10-27 at 18:52

    Finally an update, I’ve been checking this site and watching the crazyflie video nonstop. Can’t wait to place my preorder!

  10. zhooker says:
    2011-11-20 at 06:14

    This is amazing!But how do you control the speed of the motor?there are four DC motors? right?

  11. chenxin says:
    2012-01-02 at 09:04

    hello, the crazyflie is attractive to me…can u tell me something about the spare parts on it ;)

    from chn.

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