Crazyflie 1 - Meaning of blinking lights

[mchlsndrn]

Hello,

I've received my CF1 yesterday, assembled it and soldered the wires just like in the assembly video "with new motor mounts" (I never soldered before, so I'm not sure if I did it well enough, it's was very hard to solder such small parts and I hope I did not break anything).

Now when I connect the CF1 with micro USB cable to charge it:
- the green light blinks ultrafast (for half-second) at the beginning, then it stays on
- the red light keeps blinking regularly all the time.

The same thing happens with or without the battery.

Yesterday after charging I noticed the board was getting very hot in some parts... I was able to charge the battery once and turn on the CF1 using battery power, but now it does not do that anymore.

Any hints?

Thanks a lot!
-m

[tobias]

Welcome to the forum!

Here you can find information about the LEDs.

When it charges the charging chip can get quite hot. There seam to be a similar problem in this thread. Can you check the battery voltage in the cfclient?

When you connect the USB cable the green light should start blinking and become fully lit when it is fully charged. Is that the behavior?

[mchlsndrn]

Thanks Tobias!

So far I've left the CF1 charging for about an hour.

When connected via micro-USB cable, the red light blinks and green keep blinking.
The battery voltage in the client ("Battery 3000 mV") shows empty.
The graph plots a strange curve: it stays between 0.32 and 0.42, basically flat.

When disconnected, I cannot simply turn it back on. The power on off button does nothing.

What does it mean?

[mchlsndrn]

Another thing: I saw that there are some jumpers in the battery envelope, which I haven't used (on the youtube video there was no use for them).
Is it normal?

[mchlsndrn]

Hi Tobias,

I just removed the whole soldering mess I did yesterday and now the battery is charging properly again.

Do you have any suggestions on how to solder something that microscopic for a total newbie? I bought on amazon a very simple soldering kit, but the tip is too large and I'm totally unable to solder things precisely (smaller than 4-5 mm). What can I do?

[mchlsndrn]

And ... I melted the whole thing together
I just bought a new CF and a precision soldering tool. I'll try again a in few days.

[chad]

I saw that there are some jumpers in the battery envelope, which I haven't used (on the youtube video there was no use for them).
Is it normal?

I don't recall getting any jumpers in either of my Crazyflie Nano (1.0) kits... Even if I did, I am not using them.

Do you have any suggestions on how to solder something that microscopic for a total newbie? I bought on amazon a very simple soldering kit, but the tip is too large and I'm totally unable to solder things precisely (smaller than 4-5 mm). What can I do?

I'm not sure how helpful it will be but I went through the same thing and posted about it here.

[mchlsndrn]

Hi Chad, thanks for your input.

I read your blog post and I also bought the same board on amazon to exercise myself. I soldered it in 10 minutes quite easily but that did not really help with the CF1: the soldering points are extremely small and close together!

With the a tripod, a magnifier, a smaller / better soldering tool, a thinner filler wire and a looooooot more work (which gets very frustrating at times ...) I finally managed to get it flying.

I still find the soldering part extremely obnoxious, due to the ultra-small size of the holes ... The worst part was when the filler ended up filling the hole ... The second time it happened, it took an hour to clear the microscopic hole.
I just wonder why bitcraze does not sell CF already pre-soldered, or even better pre-assembled (I guess a lot of people are more interested in programming it than putting it together, especially for people without any soldering experience).

[derf]

Bitcraze actually sells a Crazyflie that does not require soldering: the Crazyflie 2.0