At the beginning of the year, we released the Crazyflie 2.1 Brushless charging dock. This project was very much an experiment for us since this is the first product we are mainly manufacturing and assembling by ourselves in Sweden. We though we would write a little bit about the reason we made it that way and how it is going.
The Chaging dock is already described in a brunch of pevious block post. It is basically a landing pad for the Crazyflie Brushless that charges the Crazyflie when landed. This is an idea and a design we have been using for years for our fair demos and that has been very useful, we would not be able to continuously fly at fair without it! Some of us even started using is on their desk to keep their Crazyflie Brushless fully charged at all time while developing with it:
However, even though it has been so useful for us, and we designed the Crazyflie Brushless to be compatible with contact-charging, we where not sure of how many people out there would want or need such a charging dock. So we decided to make it available in an experimental manner by manufacturing it by ourselves!
Why ‘made in Malmö’?
While the manufacturing we have in place for all our other products works really well, it requires a non-trivial amount of effort to start the first manufacturing batch. This is mainly due to the fact that the full mass production chain needs to be setup for the first batch and that production happens outside Bitcraze, this requires a lot of work in documentation, planning and administration.
However by doing the production in house, we are able to fix issues as they arises and to work in a much more agile way. In house production will of course no scale, but for a proof of concept it might work, this is at least what we wanted to experiment with.
There are two main improvements that has allowed us to even consider in-house experimental production: the advent of cheap and efficient PCBA services and the improvement in 3D printers reliability. This allows us to source all the parts and assemble them to make the final product.
How is a Charging Dock made?
The charging dock is comprised of two main parts: the plastic landing pad and the electronic.
The Landing pad is 3D printed by us. We now have a mini-print-farm at the office (if a Swarm starts at 2 drones, a print farm shall start at 2 concurrently running printer :):
What made it possible for us to consider running this kind of production was when we got our Bambulab X1 carbon. It is much more reliable and most importantly easier to maintain that any printer we got before, which gave confidence that we could start making products of what we printed. We now have an H2D as well. This currently allows us to print 12 landing docks per working day.
On the electronic side, we are now able to order fully assembled PCB, and even custom cable within weeks.
All we then need is assembly and testing and we got ourselves a small production line with very little risk and a lot of flexibility.
What now?
We are very pleased with what we have achieved so far with the charging dock. The first batch is sold out and we have started manufacturing a new batch with no big pain-point in sight. At some point we will have some decision to take though: do we continue in house or transition to more traditional manufacturing? Will all the work we put so far be useful for setting up mass manufacturing or will we have to restart from zero? At what batch size or frequency will we need to transition?
However this is also one of the great advantage of this: we have full control and we can decide when to manufacture where. As we have talked a bit previously, Bitcraze is a self-organized company, and this experiment actually fits very well with our way of working and keeps us agile. We hope this can free us from the doubts we usually have when thinking about more ‘niche’ products and will allow us to try new things in the future.
