Bitcraze Forums

Finally got mine actually working after getting a defective board!

Pre-Working feedback:

* First board I got the IMU was improperly soldered (resulting in over 2 weeks of a rather frustrated and very disappointed me waiting for a replacement, thanks to Tobias for handling my issue!)
* The imbalanced rotors should have been caught in production. (I understand that things happen, but when we're paying over $200 CAD for a nano-quadcopter I expect a certain level of detail, it's hard to imagine noone actually checked rotor balance even once during QA)

Both of these issues should have been caught by QA and had a fairly souring effect on my opinion of the product. (And please keep that in mind if I seem rather negative.)
Note: SeedStudio still hasn't even acknowledged my ticket (so I can tell them it's dealt with) and it's been over 20 days.

Initial (now working) feedback:

* (Mac Client) XBox 360 Controller support is very bad. The "idle" of the sticks seems to read at up to 30%. "pinning" the throttle seems to make it stick at that value (bad). Support for more esoteric controllers (Looking at you, Logitech F710) seems basically non-existent.
* (Mac Client) "Rate Control" and "Attitide control" are greyed out. (Note the spelling error here)
* (Mac Client) Love how the console shows logs even if you connect "after flight", though I suspect this has a limited buffer.
* (Mac Client) Multiple radios show up in the "Connect" menu even though I only have one CrazyRadio, it makes for a not-fun experience trying to connect sometimes.
* (Android Client) Really wish it would keep my screen awake like YouTube and some other applications do, especially while it's connected to the Crazyflie.
* (Android Client) There seems to be no co-relation between "Roll" value and "Roll Trim". For example, I can get my quad almost stable at -10 roll, but what would I set my roll trim too? It's limited from -.5 to.5
* (Crazyflie) Seems tough, awesome.
* (Crazyflie) The rotors are really easy to depress all the way onto the motor (accidentally) making them very difficult to remove.
* (Crazyflie) I spent roughly 2 hours trying to get mine not to "lean right and forward" so far with only marginal success. (Yes rotors are balanced, yes the battery is in a balanced place, yes it flies level when I hold it, yes I'm playing with trim, no it's not helping.)
* (Crazyflie) The various LED lights really don't make sense about what they're indicating at all. (When it's charged, maybe put on the green light, when it's charging blink the red?)
* (Crazyflie) Size is nice but it seems like a lot of things were sacrificed for this.
* (Crazyflie) It's quite expensive. I can get mini-quads similar to the Crazyflie locally for under $70 CAD which have similar (or better) feature-sets (But aren't open source or hackable, which I value).
* (Crazyflie) Battery life is pretty decent it seems, charging time seems a bit high.
* (Crazyflie) No (suggested) way to manage the battery connector cable, I'm using tape.
* (Crazyflie) I'd love to have an "Altitude Control" mode that would let me not have to precariously hold my thrust on hoping it stays reasonably smooth.
* (All) Wireless flashing of the ROM is awesomeeee.
* (All) Upgrade process is very easy.
* (All) Assembly is easy.
* (All) It's open source which is a huge thing for me.

Again, I've had a bit of a sour experience with things so far, so please don't take this as destructive criticism. I'm planning to update this once I manage to solve my remaining issues.

hoverbear wrote:* (Crazyflie) No (suggested) way to manage the battery connector cable, I'm using tape.

I flipped my battery around, butted it up against the uUSB port, twisted the battery-end of the cable a little, then positioned the cable around the side of the battery. I think the battery orientation helped overall stability as well. It does interfere with the power button a bit but I can still get my fingernail down there to turn it on and off...

chad wrote: I flipped my battery around, butted it up against the uUSB port, twisted the battery-end of the cable a little, then positioned the cable around the side of the battery. I think the battery orientation helped overall stability as well. It does interfere with the power button a bit but I can still get my fingernail down there to turn it on and off...

cf2_cable.png

That's a great idea! It might help my imbalance too...

EDIT: Yes, it helps a bit with the leaning imbalance and sits much sturdier now.

It finally came to Russia and I managed it to flie!
Thank you wery much for this dev kit copter. It's awesome! My two cents feedback:
I would like the battery could be attached to the board as the expansion board does. Fixed position with no wires at all would be great.
I don't like the wires go through the board, it's ugly and not handy. I thinks it will be my first hardware improvement of CF2.
Also it would be great to create a glossary page with term you are using in your wiki and forum. I'm newbie and have to google terms such RF, PA, DFU, etc.
Anyway that's exactly what I expected).

One more thing - the motor holder is not sturdy enough - I've broke two of them already

I've had a couple mounts break there as well after some hard crashes (in to the wall and onto the floor). I'd rather a $1USD mount break than the PCB airframe's arm though!

chad wrote:I'd rather a $1USD mount break than the PCB airframe's arm though!

Indeed, you're right

Hi Tobias,

I am interested in finding a way to turn-on the CF remotely. That means, you power-up the system through the push button, the CF enters in a low-power mode (hibernate?) and waits for a remote command to turn-on. After executing whatever routine is sent to (or programmed into) it the CF enters the low-pówer mode again waiting for the next wake-up command.

It seems this was discussed some time ago as per the extract below:

- The pushbutton is quite hard to press. Maybe you find a better one for a future release?

I'm not so sure we are able to do that much about the pushbutton but whats cool is that in the future we plan to put it in beacon mode so you can remotely wake it up and shut it down. The push button wouldn't have to be used then .

Has this remote wake-up been implemented yet? Or did somebody else did it and how?

Thanks,

Fede R.

Remote on/off is something I wanted for a very long time now but it never became important enough. If you would like to give it a try that would be awesome. The hardware is there to support it so it is more a matter of doing. My idea was to wake-up something like every 1s and listen for a wake-up command, if found, wakeup, if not, go to sleep again.

Some portion is actually already implemented and called sysoff: The NRF51 stays on, but the STM32 powers-off. It is possible to switch between syson/sysoff remotely using crazyflie_cpp/crazyflie_ros (I don't think the python client has support for this). Note that if you press the power button then the NRF51 goes into an even deeper sleep and you won't be able to wake-up the STM32 remotely anymore.