Bitcraze Forums

Hi

I have a question on the crazyflie inductive charging. I am curious about how the inductive charging is implemented on this quadcopter. How is the LiPo charger incoporated on this quadcopter? Thanks!

We wrote short blog post about a inductive charging hack a wile ago. I think you can find the basic information there.

I really like the Qi charger Flykit (expansion board). It's the one I keep on my Crazyflie 2.0 pretty much all the time. I make a game of trying to land it on a small, round, puck-size charger at the end of the flight. Someday it would be cool to make it autonomously land there at the end of the battery cycle but I think my brain is much too small to deliver on grandiose ideas like that!

Has "FlyKit" been officially chosen now?

"Deck" is WAY cooler!!

Call_me_a_Cab wrote:Has "FlyKit" been officially chosen now?

I'm not sure if the final decision has been made. I was just trying it on for size. I think I like Deck better too...

There has not been any final decision yet but we like deck the most too so lets go for deck! I guess we have to do some formal announcement on the blog later .

http://witricity.com/news/bloomberg-wel ... -charging/

this would be cool

chad wrote:I really like the Qi charger Flykit (expansion board). It's the one I keep on my Crazyflie 2.0 pretty much all the time. I make a game of trying to land it on a small, round, puck-size charger at the end of the flight. Someday it would be cool to make it autonomously land there at the end of the battery cycle but I think my brain is much too small to deliver on grandiose ideas like that!

I am trying to realize the automatic landing on the charging deck, but the weight of the coil is a problem. It seems like the coil is reducing the flying time. How long is your flying time with and without the inductive coil?

jamesshao8 wrote:I am trying to realize the automatic landing on the charging deck, but the weight of the coil is a problem. It seems like the coil is reducing the flying time. How long is your flying time with and without the inductive coil?

I just did a test with a fully-charged, middle-aged battery, outdoors, with moderately aggressive flying both with the Qi charger deck and without. Flight time is reduced, but not significantly. The flight time recorded here is from power-on to steady red LED 1 (low-battery indicator):

Unladen (no decks): 6 minutes, 3 seconds
Qi deck: 5 minutes, 42 seconds

Keeping in mind this battery is more than 6 months old and has many flights on it, that's not too bad. Brand new, the advertised flight time is 7 minutes with a stock battery. I would imagine you'd only lose 15 to 20 seconds with the Qi deck mounted.

In my tests I was flying outside in 7 mph gusty wind, being moderately aggressive in my flight. Still, with the added Qi deck weight of 5g, the difference in flight time was less than 30 seconds.

YMMV