Crazyradio for Cheapskates

I got a legit Crazyradio PE today from the HaD store, and got more in the box than I ordered:

I'm not slacking on TBD, promise...

Well I took my trusty USB microscope to the MPU9050, the tiny QFN that's been problematic on some Crazyflie 2.0 builds, and noticed a lack of fillets on the edges of the QFN pads. I had a "it's a UNIX system, I know this" moment from all the QFN soldering on my Tiny Bit Dingus project.

I put a little flux on the edges of the package, a little solder on my iron's chisel tip, and went around slowly heating the pins. Using flux with this kind of rework is misleading since it's hard to see the joint until you clean it off. But after cleaning and a check for shorts it booted right up with the entire IMU responding.

I assembled the rest of the quad, balanced the props while the battery took its first charge, and stayed up way too late playing.

Got my Crazyflie in the mail today. I frantically opened the package, admired all the parts, and hooked the main board up to my PC to see if I could connect. cfclient saw the Crazyflie on the radio and connected cleanly. 100% signal strength in the client app with the radio and quad just a few feet apart.

But the contents of the console window weren't so positive: the self-test failed to find any of the IMU devices on the I2C bus. I beeped out the bus at the pullups, and there don't seem to be any shorts. The forum suggests this is not uncommon and likely a soldering problem.

I'm sure I can get it replaced or repaired by Bitcraze. Regardless I'm considering this project a success.

So I was one of the lucky winners of a Crazyflie 2.0 in one of the HaD contests. I cheaped out when ordering and neglected to buy the Crazyradio PA. I assumed it was necessary only for long range flight. You know what they say about assuming.

Since ordering I've been reading Bitcraze's excellent wiki and forum, and it seems like most of the fun to be had involves a PC or RPi and the Crazyradio. I happened to know that the Logitech Unifying Receiver that my spare laptop mouse uses is based on the same chip as the Crazyradio. The Bitcraze wiki explains how the firmware and bootloader on the Crazyradio can be recovered over SPI with a JTAG adapter or Bus Pirate, so I thought it might be worth it to try the procedure on the mouse receiver while I wait for my toy to arrive.

Long story short: After some soldering and screwing around with the programmer, I got this dongle to run the Crazyradio firmware. The Crazyradio DFU programmer works, and the cfclient flight control detects it properly.

Without the Crazyflie I can't tell if it's actually working though, so there's that. I also don't have much hope that the range will be any different than BLE. Both Crazyradio models use high gain external antennas, while this uses a tiny zig zagged dipole PCB trace.