Is Solo a good option for a developer use case?

Hi Solo users,

I'm a developer looking to purchase my 1st drone and I'm not sure if the solo is the best option for me. It definitely looks like the best hardware + mounts the pixhawk2 which can't be purchased separately, but I'm concern that I might not be able to customize it or add new sensors.

I've been considering the iris or dyi-quad as options since they seem to be more developer friendly, but the solo looks so good...

1st thing that I'm interesting in doing is trying to build a web based data telemetry service for a drone.

Can anybody comment on pros/cons on the Solo a developer use case?

Thanks.

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Replies

  • Developer

    I think if it's your first drone then getting an IRIS is a good idea because it's really very cheap ($600 from 3DR) and it's a completely proven vehicle.  The Solo is quite new and although I'm sure it's going to be great, there are teething issue that could distract from your development if you're going to buy it in the near future.  The downside of the IRIS is that it's a little underpowered if flown with a gimbal and it doesn't have a built in companion computer but it depends upon what kind of development you're doing as to whether that's important.

    I think once the Solo settles down (3 months?), the gimbal is out and SoloLink is open sourced it will be a very good development platform.

  • I'm a developer, and I got a Solo because I wanted to see what it was about on the development side. 

    First thing: Not all of it is open-source, apparently. The Solo is a Linux box you can log into and look around, but I guess the source for the Solo's build of the OS isn't available. For me that isn't an issue, because all of the "Shot Manager" stuff (Orbit, Selfie, et al) is all sitting on the Solo as Python scripts in /usr/bin. It also runs MAVProxy so you can use that. 

    The Pixhawk 2's flight controller code is available at https://github.com/3drobotics. The build process for the Solo fork of ArduCopter is different from the main repository, but I finally got it to build with some help from some helpful guys on the forums. (Hint: Use arm-eabi-none-gcc version 4.7, and it will work).

    You might consider joining the "Solo Hacks" group on Facebook. There's a guy named Kevin Finistere who is apparently a known (controversial, apparently) quantity around these parts. He's been doing all kinds of digging into the Solo, found some interesting stuff. 

    3DR
    3DR has 85 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.
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