Bitcraze Forums

Im glad the 5v step up trick worked for you too Seems the way to go!

I really would like to shift the Wireless TX to the rear, and the camera back down. Any thoughts from anyone else about how I should position them?

You might have seen in my post Im experimenting with 3d prints. Im thinking of putting everything under the flie for now, the stepup and tx at the back underside, the camera at the front. First I gotta find the best way to print the prongs that click into the four holes.

Did you come up with a solution to disable the camera during charging? Id like to be able to do that from the code side.

Doesn't the step-up have an enable-disable pin? If it has you should be able to use that and to wire it to one of the expansion pins.

Great work to you two by the way!

tobias wrote:Doesn't the step-up have an enable-disable pin? If it has you should be able to use that and to wire it to one of the expansion pins.

Great work to you two by the way!

I tried two step ups,
a 3.3v with a a SHDN shutdown pin, and a 5v one without (30% smaller too).
The 3.3v one didnt work well at all at filtering nose. Im sure there is a 5v one with a shutdown pin too, but I didnt order one of those:) Just soldered on one of those tiny switches. Actually made the soldering process easier as the switch prong fit perfectly into the expansion port

If one could hook up the SHDN pin to the flie, how would one then control it? Where in the code could I control the voltage? Thanks!

It would be nice to get a transmitter and stepup regulator on to the same chip and have that plug directly into the expansion ports. Maybe one day

No shutdown pin in use on mine yet omw.
A thought from the products specs page:

The SHDN pin can be driven low (under 0.4 V) to power down the regulator and put it in a low-power state....
The SHDN pin can be driven high (above 1.2 V) to enable the board, or it can be connected to VIN or left disconnected if you want to leave the board permanently enabled.

source
This makes me wonder if you could connect a spare power connection to it, Perhaps Pin 20 (VCCA), or Pin 1 (VCC) ?

If the above quote is true, you may not even need to do a cf specific wiring..


I'm still experimenting with placement. By having shorter wires, and everything near that section (the red blinking light area of the crazyflie, it was very biased in weight. I tried shifting just the camera to the rear of it, where the blue light is. Then it few well, and gave me a good 10 seconds of inflight rear-fpv footage

The other thing I done, was mount the Regulator on the bottom, covering where the arm chip is in the center underneath. It's not thick enough to stop it still sitting on the ground.

Of course with this method, forward and back are the wrong way around. I can train myself to ignore that if it's fine.

Also I did try X Mode client on the android app. It felt less balanced using it.

Have had three fpv flights so far. Getting progressively longer between crashing it to the ground.

I think something odd may happening while charging now. About 5 minutes into charging, the green light stays fully green now. In other words, I don't seem to get a full charge. I try to fly it and only have about 30 seconds flight, with the red battery indicator turning on quickly. What state makes the crazyflie think it's fully charged?

Here is a video showing the charging problem:
https://vimeo.com/72499637

The Shutdown pin to make charging faster may be more important to get working now :p

*Edit* Anyone interested - The reason for the above is that the regulator is broken in my quad. Probably from me shorting it at some point.

tobias wrote:

omwdunkley wrote:Ive soldered a larger transmitter (small ones out of stock) and the fpvhobby 1g camera and the video quality is great until I start the motors Then I get all that noise that was previously discussed. Im guessing the transmitter I have wants more voltage then it can get.

The noise is from the motor PWM-ing and can be filtered away with an inductor. I tried a 22uH inductor between the VCOM and the camera VCC supply and then almost all noise was gone. If you get video dropouts it is caused by voltage drops though.

Tobias,
I couldn't find the right 22uH inductor you were referring to here. Too many types to choose from on the internet. Could you provide a link/pic to help me find the right one?

I just took an inductor I had lying around. Most inductors rated above ~500mA and above 10-20uH should work fine.

tobias wrote:I just took an inductor I had lying around. Most inductors rated above ~500mA and above 10-20uH should work fine.

Hi, for me an inductor helped but no where near as much as a step up voltage regulator did. I'm not using an inductor at all any more:) links to all the specific parts I used are here: http://forum.bitcraze.se/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=491

I believe superroach outlined similar results a few pages earlier.

Good luck and let us know about your progress! Cheers

Hi everyone.

I'm also trying to install wireless camera on my crazyflie, and I already got stuff ready.

This is what it looks: I can already acquire video through VLC media player. However, when I try to connect to the Crazyflie at the same time, the client can't see the file. Then I removed the power supply to the FPV system, and the flie was detected. I first thought that was because of the channel crash, but after I changed the flie's channel to some other channels, the flie still can't be detected. Have you ever met with this problem? What are your settings? I'm using 2414 MHz for the video signal, and I have tried the flie's channel at ch 1, 10 (default of the Crazyflie), and 110.

EDIT: I changed to ch 110 and now I can connect both crazyflie and video at the same time BUT the signal is not stable. Link quality is worsened and sometimes lead to signal lost. Anyway, I tried unplugging the supply to the voltage regulator, and the connection is stable like normal. I also tried putting another crazyflie close to the one with camera, connecting at adjacent channel (110 vs 111) and the one without camera can also connect with no problem. At this point I think it is not the problem of interference of the frequency. What I doubt is whether my circuit has some problem, or the camera system draws too much current causing drop in the crazyflie's transmitter power.

I'm using this transmitter, with Pololu step-up/down voltage regulator. On the receiver side, I'm also using an EasyCap USBTV007 Wireless receiver.

I also have a problem of getting video from the EasyCap USBTV007 on ROS, as I have asked here

FINAL EDIT: I found out that I burned the regulator U9 on the crazyflie!!! It came to my mind that I have got similar problem like this before but that time was more severe: the connection was lost quicker than this time (See here for reference.) So I measured VCC pin and it was 2.1 V instead of 2.8 V. Then I also found that the voltage regulator was well swollen and I remember seeing some smoke coming out from the flie. This all binds together and I decided to change the voltage regulator (what a tough task!) and finally can now connect to both crazyflie and video at the same time.

Anyway, I still cannot connect my EasyCap USBTV to ROS. If anyone knows, please

Well, well, well,

When I finished assembling all parts to the crazyflie and mounting the camera close to the flie, the connection became bad again. I tried another flie with channel set at 110 (the one with the camera is 111) and connect it to the computer while the video is transmitting. I could connect to 110 well until I bring 110 very close to 111 and then the connection was bad and lost. Seems like it is the conflict in the 2.4 GHz band. However, SuperRoach has done connecting the flie while the video is transmitting, right? from the video.

I tried contacting him by personal message but seems like his inbox is full, because the messages stay in my outbox. Does anyone here have his contact?