Discussions

In general, the whole area of UAV development is still pretty disorganized, particularly, I come from another forum, and have been developing a high payload scratch built quad using some famous cloned boards.

And they work well, and specifically are low cost. But it costs an arm and a leg to find good support and proper documentation.

Here things are different, I can see that. A fantastic business model, extensive professional grade technical input, a good range of product choices, and healthy and solid turnkey product mix.

But for someone like me say, coming from outside, even though highly technically experienced and knowledgable of the field, it's quite difficult to get a grasp of what a particular product really is.

The pixHawk struck me as a very interesting platform. I want to get into it. I develop scratch built almost always... a quirk. But after 2 or 3 days on the internet I'm still not really sure what the pixhawk actually is.

The getting started page brought me a long way. I have loaded the imu_autopilot to my linux from github...

but what IS the pixhawk. does it include the computer vision system, do I need more support for that, is the imu_autopilot, just the base firmware,? do you need to load an app on top?

There are a lot of questions, and although I know that a LOT of work has gone into it, I still feel the same documentary disorganization as the rest of the industry.

I'm not trying to be a party pooper. I mention this becasue maybe, from inside, these shortfalls are not seen. Maybe many good developers are being lost because it's just too jumbled to piece together cleanly.

It's not a technology problem. That is very clear. And solid. and refreshing. and it's about time.

It's a problem of product documentation. Especially when the development is so diversified.

So please don't be offended. I wanted to share the view of a newcomer trying to come in.