I have just bought the new APM2.5 board and see there are quite a few changes made to this compered to the APM2.0 board.
When will the APM2.5 wiki be available? I see the APM2.5 doesn't come with the SD card bay. So why was this dropped and how can this be added? Also on APM2.0 it states you cant use the 3D radio while the board is plugged into the USB port because they use the same terminals. Is this still the case with the APM2.5 board?
I am also curious why there is a need for 3 UARTS ports and can the 3v/GND pins next to the reset pins be used for 3v outlet power or is this only for 3v power supply?
Would be nice to have the wiki up for this board and outlining the differences and the changes made.
Replies
John, now that customers are getting the boards, we'll update the wiki. There actually aren't many changes that affect users (most of the changes are electrical, with more robust power and signal protection):
1) The dataflash is onboard, rather than in a custom card. Too many people were having troubles with the card connections
2) You still can't use telem and USB at the same time. This is to free up a spare UART for future use (smart PDB, etc). The chip has 4: 1 UART for GPS, 1 UART for USB/Telem, 1 UART for dataflash/SPI access, and 1 UART for future use.
3) The only other difference is that you need a different cable (supplied) to connect to the 3DR/Xbee radios, since we moved to a 5-pin connector on that (to avoid people plugging them in backwards).