It’s always a good feeling to wrap up the week with a Fun Friday project – especially when it involves some questionable mechanical additions to a Crazyflie platform. This time, I decided to test the capabilities of the upcoming Color LED deck by turning it into a Disco deck.
Mechanics
The core of the Disco Deck is pretty simple: a 3D-printed disco ball mounted directly on top of the Color LED Deck with a couple of screws. To bring it to life, I added a Sub-Micro Plastic Planetary Gearmotor and used a rubber band as a drive belt to transfer the rotation. It’s a lightweight, low-tech solution that works surprisingly well with the Crazyflie 2.1 Brushless. All the structural parts were designed to be easily 3D printed in PLA, and they fit on a single print plate for a quick build. You can find all the part files here.
Electronics & Firmware
On my first attempt, I connected the motor directly to VCC and GND, which meant it started spinning as soon as the Crazyflie powered up. This turned out to be a problem as the vibrations prevented the Crazyflie from completing its initialization sequence, since it needs to remain completely still for about one second at startup. The proper fix was to connect the motor to one of the GPIO pins (IO_4) along with GND. For the firmware, I added a new deck driver for setting the IO_4 output to low during initialization and controlling it through a parameter.
Next Steps
The biggest limitation of the current Disco Deck design is the landing. The disco ball extends below the length of the Crazyflie 2.1 Brushless legs, which means the drone can’t take off or land horizontally – not even when using the standard Crazyflie 2.1 Brushless charging dock. To fix this, I’m planning to design a custom charging dock that also works as a stable landing platform for the Party drone.
If you’re interested on the process, you can check out the project repository for any updates.