About Us

We are passionate about hardware, software and technology in general, and we want others to be too. The goal is to enable people to explore, investigate, innovate, research and educate – that’s why all our stuff is open. Go play with it!

What we do

We develop and manufacture a small quadcopter called the Crazyflie. We also develop and maintain a supporting infrastructure with various clients, expansion decks, debuggers, development environments and tools to enable the end users to modify the Crazyflie in any way they want.

History

Bitcraze AB was founded in 2011 by the designers of the Crazyflie quadcopter. The purpose of the company was to finance the development and manufacturing of a Crazyflie kit and to make it available as an open source development platform.

The initial project

We started the work on the Crazyflie quadcopter in late 2009 as a competence development project called Daedalus in the Swedish consulting company Epsilon AB, where all three founders where employed at the time. The work was done during our free time with component costs paid by Epsilon. In 2010 we finally decided to send a video of the Crazyflie to Hackaday.com and that’s when things really took off. More development was done and we decided to make a Crazyflie kit that could be manufactured and sold as an open source development platform. To finance the development and manufacturing of the kit we created Bitcraze AB. At this point we felt that the project had outgrown the Daedalus Projects and decided to launch Bitcraze.io.

Crazyflie

Crazyflie is a small quadcopter that started with a simple idea: get an electronic board to fly. We were three embedded engineers from Sweden and we wanted to make a small flying machine that could be used indoors (it is often cold outside in Sweden ;-)) and with as few mechanical parts as possible. The result of this idea was a small quadcopter that used its printed circuit board (PCB) as the main mechanical frame with motors glued to the PCB. At that point it was the smallest quadcopter in the world. This first prototype was refined, manufactured and sold in 2013.

Crazyflie 2.0

Thanks to the success of the Crazyflie nano quadcopter, the three Bitcraze founder could leave there day-job and concentrate the year 2014 into designing the Crazyflie 2.0. Crazyflie 2.0 was designed to be as versatile as possible with a deck expansion port accepting future upgrade as well as accepting user enhancement.