As promised here’s a new Monday post. Below are some screenshots of our PC side/ground station software written in Python using pyUSB, pyGame and PyQt4. It’s far from finished but it’s good enough for us to get real-time plots of flight data and control parameters. Unfortunatly we did not have a flying prototype at hand while writing this post so the data is somewhat fake but good enough to show the concept.
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.
We uploaded some pictures from Techfest to a Picasa album. We are also working on cutting the video material that we have into something that’s a bit better. If you have any good pictures that you took or any scans of articles that was in the news papers don’t hesitate to send them over. The email is on the About page.
We upload there the posters used at Techfest. They describe the basic components of the new crazyflie version. A video will follow.
We would like to thanks everyone that came to see us at Techfest-2012 for there enthusiasm for our project. That’s was a a really awesome experience and gives us a lot of energy to continue!
From the 6th to the 8th of January we are exhibiting the Crazyflie at the Techfest at IIT Bombay in India. If you are there come by our exhibition in the Exhibitions tent and have a look!
Welcome to our new website Bitcraze.se! This bog/website is the home of the Crazyflie quadcopter and other projects we could come up with. News, progress, design and random thoughts about the project will be posted here. Out goal is to post some update at least every second week. More information about the project are still avaliable on the daedalus projects blog.
Why Bitcraze and not Daedalus Projects?
Originally the Daedalus projects blog/website was created to showcase the competence development projects that was done by the employees at Epsilon Embedded Systems in their free time. This is were the Crazyflie project first started. Last year we finally decided to send to a video of the Crazyflie to Hackaday.com and that’s when things really took off. More development was done and we decided to make a Crazyflie kit that could be manufactured and sold as an open source development platform. To finance development and manufacturing of the kit we created Bitcraze AB. At this point we felt that the project had outgrown the Daedalus Projects and decided to launch Bitcraze.se. The Daedalus projects website will still be up and active but news and progress for the Crazyflie will be posted on Bitcraze.se instead.