// the find
espressif/esp-drone
Mini Drone/Quadcopter Firmware for ESP32 and ESP32-S Series SoCs.
ESP-Drone is quadcopter firmware for ESP32/S2/S3 chips, ported from the Crazyflie project and swapping its STM32/Nordic radio stack for Wi-Fi control. It's aimed at STEAM education and hobbyists who want to build a sub-$30 drone with an ESP32 and a mobile app. Not a production flight controller — a learning platform.
The Crazyflie port is a real win: you get a battle-tested PID controller, Kalman filter state estimator, and the full CRTP protocol stack rather than starting from scratch. ESP-IDF component structure is clean — drivers, HAL, and flight modules are properly separated, not one giant main.c. Supporting cfclient out of the box means you can tune PID gains and log sensor data over Wi-Fi without writing any tooling. Hardware schematics are published, so you're not guessing at the PCB.
Espressif explicitly downgraded this to limited support in December 2022 — it's essentially archived. The Crazyflie core is pinned to a January 2021 tag, so four-plus years of upstream stabilizer and estimator improvements are missing. Height-hold and position-hold require extension boards that aren't well documented and are hard to source outside China. The Wi-Fi control path adds latency compared to the original 2.4GHz radio, and there's no honest characterization of how bad that latency actually is for flight control.