Seeedstudio cooperation

Ever since we decided to make the Crazyflie available as a kit we have looked at different possibilities for manufacturing and selling it. Because we don’t have much time to spend (due to that we all have daytime jobs…) and rather spend or time doing development, we needed someone that could take care of manufacturing and selling it.

During development we have been cooperating with Seeedstudio for prototype manufacturing and component sourcing. We were really pleased with their work so we decided to continue the cooperation to also let them manufacture and sell the Crazyflie and the USBRadio dongle.

Currently the plan is to start out with a small series of 100 kits which will be a “DIY” version.  The motors/battery has to be soldered and the motor mounts attached. If you have some soldering skills it won’t be a problem to assemble.  The next step would then be to increase the volume and also offer a RTF kit where everything is assembled. The reason for not doing the RTF kit from the beginning is that it’s more time consuming since we have to specify testing requirements and packaging for the platform.

As for the price we still have no number but our hope are that it will be in the 100-200USD range. Since we are still working on the motor mounts and we are unsure of the assembly/testing cost for the platform we don’t know for sure how much the units will cost to produce. Once this is clear we will post more info of the pricing for the different kits (DIY/RTF and USBRadion dongle).

 

27 comments on “Seeedstudio cooperation

  • Maybe in the future, if everything goes well, and we make thousands then the price might be in the 50-75USD range but unfortnatly not for the first 100. Making small volumes is costly and one have to accept a higher price to buy one from the first batch.

    • Actually we are using GCC from codecourcery with Makefile as a basic dev environement. One of us is using Eclipse on top of that, the two others Gedit or any text editor and a console. This way of developing has worked, over time, on windows and linux seemlessly. We are usign openOCD to flash the STM32.

        • Hi,

          There are a few GCC specific directives in the code that would have to be changed to the equivalent in IAR but it shouldn’t be too much work.

          If you try to port it drop by our forum at http://forum.bitcraze.se to get some tips/help and share your progress.

          /Marcus

  • just have a question and I don’t know what your design goals exactly were so please forgive if it’s a stupid question. Isn’t the 32-bit ARM @ 70mhz overkill for this little guy? I would have thought an ATMEGA would have been more than enough, probably even make the battery last longer, however as I said I’m not in on the design so I’m probably wrong.

    Thanks!

    • Well, I guess the original reason for choosing an STM32 was to learn how to use it and to be sure to have enough power to run anything required to get the copter to fly. Indeed you can potentially go pretty far in term of sensor fusion and regulation and we do not want to be limited by the CPU power. Also most part of the algorithms are currently implemented using floating point arithmetic which would be harder with a 8Bit processor (Of course everything could be implemented in fixed point but it would require time and effort that we rather put to release the coper ;-).

      As for the battery, the STM32 are pretty good for being able to disable all the non-used peripheral (and to hardfault when the programmer forget to clock a used peripheral by the way) and we could reduce the clock speed. However we have the motors that consume 1Amp on the same board so I doubt the CPU has a lot of influence on the flight time…

      Thanks for following us!

  • Is there a way to be on the list for the first batch? I would like to be on it..
    Very cool copter, the CrazyFlie!!!

  • Mmm.. that’s a pity seeing such a nice project ending up being produced in China.
    Our experience with non public projects proved that China has advantages (price being the most important) but that you can also get burned much. Also, with smart project engineering and good contacts you can get very competitive results even when producing in EU.
    Good luck with this.

    FV

  • Guys,

    Very cool project, wondering of its release in DIY/Assembled to the masses. BTW, is there a way to add a small video camera?

    keep up the great job!

    best,
    \\ carlos

  • I would be interested in purchasing a kit without motors or batteries.

    The central unit could control a quad copter of any scale. I have my own motors.

    could you make a kit available without motors or batteries?

    • It is possible to cut the arms a bit and attach carbon rod and use your own motors, propellers and battery but there are of course some limitations of the system.
      The charge current is limited to 500mA if attached to normal USB. If it is attached to a USB charger adapter then it could charge at up to 1.2A. The battery should have a protection circuit.
      The max continious current for the power path is limited to 4-5A.

  • You can count me in for one at $ 100-$200
    I think thats reasonable for early adopters
    Bobby

        • First we said Q2, which ended in June… Because of the obsolete sensors it has been pushed. Now we aim for September/October however making projects at you free time often don’t go along with following a time plan.

  • Will it be possible to have kits compatible with small mobile phone cameras for aerial photography?

  • Hi

    I would be very interested in converting a crazyflie so that it can be power from a laser. What is the power requirements to keep the micro quad-copter aloft?

    Cheers,
    Bert Murray
    Lighthouse dev LLC

    • Interesting! We have not been able to accurately measured the power consumption during hovering but it should be around 5 W. A 5 W laser sound dangerous :-)

  • Hey guys, I just stumbled upon the project, but it looks great. If you need help selling them, I run tindie.com, an ‘etsy for electronics.’ We’d love to help out. Just shoot me an email-

    Emile

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