Versatility of Crazyflie

[ingfut]

Hi,
i am a new user and i would like to explore Crazyflie, i would like to use it as my research platform for autonomous flight
Please tell me
1:- Is is fully programmable?
2:- what kind of interfaces i can use?
3:- What are the hardware/sensors i can hack/add with it

[Surrender]

Hello ingfut,

Yes it's fully programmable, no restrictions (STM32 with FreeRTOS) -> you can do what you want.
There is a Extension Header hardware interface. Here is a description of the extension header: Extension Header Wiki
It includes a JTAG part, UART RX/TX OR I2C and SPI.

The crazyflie has a weight of 19g and it can hold up to ~5 -7 extra gramms. With each gram the flight time decreases.
This means you need very lightweight sensors to fly efficient. If you need more payload you can add 4 motors -> Double motors and another battery (~340mAh). Link

Included sensors are baro-, magneto-, accelero- and gyrometer. You can also measure the temperature of the STM32 (not implemented yet) or with the barometer. Baro & Magneto are not finished with firmware implementation.

I hope this helps you,
Greetings

[ingfut]

HI Surrender,
Thanks for your detailed reply
One more question i would like to ask here
Is it possible to change the STM32 with some other latest more powerful MCU
what could be the possible steps to do so

[Surrender]

Good morning,

We have talked previously about this topic on this thread.

Maybe the SoC is updated in future to a more powerful one, but this also needs a redesign of the board.

[marcus]

HI Surrender,
Thanks for your detailed reply
One more question i would like to ask here
Is it possible to change the STM32 with some other latest more powerful MCU
what could be the possible steps to do so

Hi,

That might be hard. Maybe there's a drop-in replacement from the STM32F3 series, but depending on what you would like to do there's still lots of resources left (more time for calculation, RAM and flash). Do you have some specific usage in mind?

/Marcus

[ingfut]

Yes i am thinking for some more powerful MCU like ARM® Cortex™-M4 i.e.TI (Stellaris LM4F232) or Freescale(Kinetis K MK10DN512VLK10 )
I am thinking some on board video/image processing (like connecting Kinnect kind of sensors ) which would need more power and payload capability (form factor should not be change) i want to see this platform beyond a Toy/hobbyist towards a more versatile platform (research/VR/games )

One more thing as we know crazyflie is a open source project but still there are less or no information about how they have done board design/sensor selection and all (but still its one of the unique one)

So if we get some more insight about how they design board and if some one wanna change the board design (or redesign whole board) that would be awesome

[marcus]

There are schematics and component placement and some information about the hardware design on the wiki. There's also a lot of information about the project history in our blog posts.

I'm not sure if there are any Cortex-M4 that are pin-compatible from ST. Most of the ones with more features and peripherals are larger (or BGA) and fitting that in with the current size of the PCB would be hard.

[ingfut]

I have looked those links but i am not able to get some inside about hardware design i mean how to we extend above idea towards new more versatile platform.

Thank you

[marcus]

I have looked those links but i am not able to get some inside about hardware design i mean how to we extend above idea towards new more versatile platform.

The best would probably be to exchange the motors or use 4 extra motors and then add an addon board that is connected to the Crazyflie though the extension header. This would allow you to use the Crazyflie to do platform orientation control and then do image processing on your addon board. Depending on what kind of image processing you have in mind it might be a bit tricky with the space constraint.

[ingfut]

Hi Marcus,
As i have decided ordering a CrazyFlie for me, please suggest things i would need with it to buy? (for a beginner user)

And also suggest backup things which i could be use....