Finally after more than 2 years of work on the kit, the first Crazyflie Nano Quadcopters are arriving at customers! It’s been a long journey with lots of ups and downs, and we are really happy that we managed to reach the goal (and on time).

For anyone who missed the pre-order, more kits will be available at Seeedstudio from the 6th of May. In addition to the products that are already there we will also make the motor-mounts available as spare parts. The 6-DOF and 10-DOF kits will be the same as for the pre-order (include the Crazyradio dongle) but the price for the 10-DOF kit will be updated to $179. Why the new price? Adding the two sensors turned out to be a bit more pricey then we thought.

Now to the technical stuff, here are some of the updates since last week:

• Updated assembly with the new motor-mounts
• Binary distribution page containing a brand new Windows installer for the Crazyflie Client (no need to install dependencies anymore) and also the latest firmware build for the Crazyflie.
• A lot of smaller bug-fixes in the client and improved performance of the Crazyflie. So make sure to update to the latest firmware/client when you get you Crazyflie.
• The Wiki is being updated (as always) and we are doing our best to catch up. We haven’t had time to set up the registration for the wiki, but if you feel like doing some editing drop us an email and we will set you up with an account.

Since this is the first time the Crazyflie and Crazyflie PC client are distributed there are bound to be bugs that we haven’t caught yet. So if you find any bugs it would be great if you wanted to drop by our Bitbucket page and report issues. And if you feel the urge to write some code, then have a look at how to contribute. There will probably be some bug reports and if not there’s always the wishlist.

We are always eager to get some feedback from our users so drop by our forum and let us know what you think about our projects or to pitch some crazy project ideas.

We finally got to measure the weight more precisely, just under 19g

Crazyflie weight with new motor mounts

A big thanks to Seeedstudio for making this possible. And to all of you, we really hope you enjoy your new Crazyflies :-)

So, like we wrote last Monday, we are visiting Seeedstudio in Shenzhen, China. It’s been a great visit and we have gotten a chance to see both the Seeedstudio offices, the production and a bit of Shenzhen. And of course we also got a chance to do some shopping at the local markets. If you ever happen to find yourself in Shenzhen make sure to drop by the SEG Electronics Market, it’s a great place for electronics enthusiasts such as us!

Since we had some problems getting vacation all at once from our employers we decided to travel separately and overlapping each other a bit. Tobias left first and then me and Arnaud a couple of days later. After roughly 22 hours of travel we landed in Hong Kong and took the bus/train to Lo Wu to the Chinese boarder. Since I went traveling the week before and I couldn’t send my passport for the visa application we took the chance that we could apply for one at the boarder (after reading about it online). Turn out that it’s very easy to get a visa for the Shenzhen area (not all of China) at the boarder at Lo Wu. Took about 5 minutes and cost between ~130 yen. Just note that it’s not all nationalities that this applies to and the rules seem to change every once and a while.

Meanwhile Tobias spent his time visiting Seeedtudio and got to see the production. All the PCB assemblies was already done but the testing was running full speed. We use a simplified bed of nails test-jig that does the programming and tests voltages, current, battery charging, motor drivers etc. It is working very well and every Crazyflie plus Crazyradio takes about 2 minutes to program and test.

Visiting at Seeedstudio was great! We have been mailing and talking on Skype for the last 18 months with lots of people there and it was great to finally meet them in real life. Of course we got a guided tour around their offices which seems like a great place to work, lots of electronics everywhere :-) We also got a chance to catch up on the progress for the production. There’s lots of practical problems to solve when we scale up from only doing prototypes to full production, such as test-rigs for the Crazyflie.

After doing some research online we decided to head for the SEG Electronic Market to check it out and do some shopping. Inside it’s like a bazaar filled with small corridors and little booths selling all kinds of stuff. And this continues for 9 floors! On the first two floors you will find mechanics, electronic components, measurement equipment, leds, cabling… The list just goes on, they even had a small pick and place machine for prototype batches. Continuing upwards it becomes more and more computer hardware like graphics cards, mother boards, memory and hard-drives. These floors also have stuff like routers, cameras and tablets. Going even higher up everything is put together and you can buy laptops and computers. Its really amazing the diversity of things you can find, we even saw some cashier machines. Walking from the bottom floor upwards we really got the feeling that as you get higher things get more and more assembled. And everything is very cheap, for example we bought 300 pogo-pins in different variations for 100 yen (~16 USD), but expect the quality to be there after.

So what did we end up buying? Well, lots of stuff! We bought a lot of prototype stuff that we will use for the Crazyflie like cables, antennas, screws and batteries. And we also found a really nice USB microscope with a stand that does 500x magnification :-)

We uploaded some photos to our Picasa album for Seeed/Shenzhen.

Hi, Monday again. We just passed the two most exiting weeks in Bitcraze history. As we speak we are passing the 1K Crazyflie sold which is about 5 times over our optimistic estimations. Now the pressure is on, and there is still one week of pre-order left :-).

We are continuing to update the documentation, working on Crazyflie firmware, the PC gui client and as well all emails/administrative work that takes a surprising amount of time :-). Due to popular interest the focus has been on getting the client to work on Mac OSX and getting Crazyflie to work in a standalone mode (ie. no PC) with an E-sky R/C transmitter which is compatible with our radio chip. The transmitter is almost working (still some mapping issues to work out) and the OSX proof-of-concept is on the way to work (it should work out of the box if all the python libs where 64bits).

We should probably clarify that the PS3 controller we use to control the Crazyflie is just one possible input method. Actually any input device could be used which could be translated into roll, pitch, yaw and thrust. The GUI also simplifies it as there is a configuration dialog and soon we might have our first contribution which is for the xbox controller :-)

We are continually updating the wiki and are starting to get some activity on the forum. It is the right place to go if you have questions or want to discuss about the Crazyflie.

Thanks again for supporting us, one more crazy pre-order week to go!