Crazyflie open source quadcopter
Swedish startup launches this year’s must-have open source hardware toy
Swedish startup firm Bitcraze is launching an open source hardware kit for building the Crazyflie, a nano-scale quadcopter. The company’s founders Marcus Eliasson, Arnaud Taffanel and Tobias Antonsson, say that the project started with “a simple idea: get an electronic board to fly.” In the online demonstrations, the 9cm x 9cm quadcopter is controlled, via 2.4GHz radio, from a PC using a standard USB gaming controller. The current PC software includes a wireless radio bootloader, along with real-time telemetry, which supports the on-board gyroscope needed to keep the device steady in flight. However, the kit is intended as an open source platform for users to hack and develop with new functionality.
Existing hacks include the addition of a keychain camera, LED lighting, inductive charging and what appears to be some form of vision control system similar to an Apache helicopter. Despite the firm advertising its agility, there is also a set of training guards for novice pilots to protect the rotors from impact. A sensible addition given the blistering speeds the Crazyflie can achieve! Ahead of release, the first batch of 300 Crazyflie kits has already sold out. The next batch of 500 kits is available to pre-order now for $173 from www.seeedstudio.com, with shipping expected at the beginning of May. For more info and videos of the Crazyflie in action, the project’s website is at: www.bitcraze.se
Technical specs
Weight 19g
Size 90 mm motor to motor
Range Up t o 80m (environment dependent) when using the Crazyradio USB dongle
Flight time Up t o 7 minutes with standard 170mAh Li-Po battery
Connections Standard micro-USB connector for charging, which takes ~20min for the stock 170mAh Li-Po battery
Receiver On-board low-energy radio @1mW based on the nRF24L01+ chip MCu Po werful 32-bit MCU: STM32F103CB @72 MHz (128KB flash, 20KB RAM)
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