Ever wanted a development kit that flies? Well now you can! The Crazyflie is an open source nano quadcopter kit designed for flexible development and hacking. It's among the smallest in the world, weighing only 19 grams and measuring 9 cm motor to motor.

The development platform is open source so schematics and firmware/host source code is available at the Bitcraze website as well as a Wiki with design information and details on how to set up the development environment and get started. It’s designed with development in mind and has an expansion header that enables developers to expand the platform as well as good software development support. Due to it’s small size it’s perfect for developing new software and can easily be flown inside.

A 2.4 GHz radio chip from Nordic Semiconductors is used for receiving commands and sending telemetry data back to the host computer. The communication with the host is made possible by using the Crazyradio 2.4 GHz USB radio dongle. The Crazyradio can be connected to a PC (with support for Windows and Linux) but also to other hosts that support USB Host or OTG like Android phones.

The Crazyflie Quadcopter is shipped pre-programmed but can easily be wirelessly updated via a radio bootloader from a host PC, so no JTAG is required for reprogramming. For advanced development and debugging there’s also an accessible JTAG interface.

This kit requires soldering skills and is not for beginners. Please see assembly instructions and video.

More details on this project can be found the Crazyflie project page

The Crazyradio is the official radio dongle for the Crazyflie Nano Quadcopter Development Kit. It is a 2.4GHz USB radio dongle based on the nRF24LU1P chip from Nordic Semiconductor.

The design includes a 2×5 header (not mounted) where the dongle can be connected and powered from another source than USB.

The dongle is delivered with open source firmware and Python drivers that enables easy use of the dongle to communicate with projects using a compatible Nordic Semiconductor radio chip. The firmware can be freely modified as is built from datasheet and uses open source compiler (sdcc).

A bootloader on the dongle enables firmware updates without using any external programmer.

More details on this project can be found the Crazyradio project page