Hello,
It is now Monday evening which is now our official meeting day within the Crazyflie team. From now on we intend to post a progress update every Monday evening here at the Bitcraze blog. First of we can tell you that we have, since two weeks, received our second round of prototypes. For the second round of prototypes we did some small fixes and improvements which unfortunately did not all work.
- We fixed an issue with the standby current which was 150uA, due to a misplaced diode, but was supposed to be below 10uA according to our design.
- We moved the battery measurement point to the actual battery instead of behind the system off switch so we can measure the battery when it is charging as well. Unfortunately a design mistake made the standby current go up to 250uA instead. Fixed one issue just to introduced another one…
- We have discovered a problem with the MAX16054 ON/OFF switch we use to turn the system on and off. If the battery voltage is above 3.5V it refuses to turn on but if it is below it works as expected. We sent a support message to Maxim and hope it can be solved fast. This circuit worked on our first prototypes and it seems to be due to the now removed diode we spoke about in the first bulletin…
Other then that we are getting close to a pretty well working flying PCB.
We have tested a couple of LiPo batteries in different sizes from Fullriver. We decided to go for the 170mAh 25C battery which gives us about 7min of flight time but doesn’t add to much weight.
We have tested a lot of different pager motors in mainly the sizes 6×14 and 6×15 mm. Many of them are not the best quality but we found a good one, 2.5ohm, 6x15mm motor which is of good quality and high performance.
What is left now is the motor mountings which has turned out to be a time consuming task for us since none of us has any direct mechanical/plastic experience. We also have loads of other tasks but let’s take it one step at a time.
There is a short video of the new prototype flying that somebody took when we visited Techfest if you want to have a look.
/The Crazyflie team
Very cool. Keep up the great work, I am looking forward to one day purchasing a kit. You guys should check out the work being done at the University of Pennsylvania (their quadrocopters look very similar to yours). Here is a video that so far has over 500,000 views in the first day since it was published:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQIMGV5vtd4&feature=player_embedded
i have been looking for something like this for a while i definately want one of these send me an email when the kits are available thanks paul
send me an email when the kits are for sale thanks paul
Great to hear you guys are making progress. That quad is so cool and sooooo tiny. I love that it has accelerometers, because I am not much of a pilot. Any idea on the cost yet?
Do you have a RSS feed for this site? I don’t want to miss any updates!
I’m looking forward to getting a kit, once available! Tiny, simple, and with a nice programmable MCU… nobody could overtake your sweet toy ;-)