The quadcopter craze continues. This time with a very small, very cool, open source kit. The Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter sells in two versions (both under $180) and will continue to develop and improve as more smart kids tinker with the open source code.
One of the cool bits, especially for the gamer types, is the fact that you fly this tiny remote control quadcopter with a PS3 controller. Simply amazing. See the Crazyflie Nano in action after the break.
Crazyflie features
- Small and lightweight, around 19g and about 90mm motor to motor
- Flight time up to 7 minutes with standard 170mAh Li-Po battery
- Standard micro-USB connector for charging which takes ~20min for the stock 170mAh Li-Po battery
- On-board low-energy radio@1mW based on the nRF24L01+ chip. Up to 80m range (environment dependent) when using the Crazyradio USB dongle
- Radio bootloader which enabled wireless update of the firmware
- Powerful 32 bit MCU: STM32F103CB @ 72 MHz (128kb flash, 20kb RAM)
- 3-axis high-performance MEMs gyros with 3-axis accelerometer: Invensense MPU-6050
- 3-axis magnetometer HMC5883L (compass)
- High precision altimeter MS5611-01BA03
- Expansion header 2×10 pins 1.27mm (0.05") pitch including power, I2C/UART, SPI/ADC. Header also contains ARM Cortex 10-pin JTAG (header not included)
- 4-layer low noise PCB design with separate voltage regulators for digital and analog supply
Crazyradio features
- 2.4GHz radio communication
- 0dBm output power (1mW)
- 125 radio channels
- 2Mbps, 1Mbps and 250Kps communication data-rate
- Sends and receives data packets of up to 32 bytes
- Automatically handles addresses and packet ACK
- Hardware support for PPM input (no software support yet)
- Can be powered with up to 16V via header
- Tested up to ~80m range at 250Kbps
Kit includes
- 1 x Crazyflie control board
- 1 x Crazyradio
- 1 x Antenna 2 DBi
- 4 x Motor mounts
- 5 x Coreless DC motors
- 4 x CW propeller
- 4 x CCW propeller
- 1 x LiPo battery
What is not included but needed for flying
- A standard micro-USB cable for charging
- A PS3 compatible joystick
- A PC