sUAV technology is now on a plateau, anyone could build a drone to bid a contract, and fooling customer with flight time, or lowering price by incapable hardware. Lily fails, Parrot is cutting jobs, This market is NOT healthy.

Even worse, an average user still crash their DJIs a lot: flying a dji from balcony then flip vertically to the ground, racing drones still use analog modulation to acquire flickering video and crash into trees, false GPS lock for careless pilot and then fly away...  although they are all “pilot error”.

Where to go to have fun? Depends how serious you are.

Now tesla has autopilot, mercedes has E class also doing L2 autopilot, but a $5000+ sedan is way too much comparing a DJI toy, or any rc toy including a turbine jet. Or you can join Udacity course to have a nano degree on this. Well, it depends how serious you want to go, and last but not least, put your ass in a car with a RESET button is not the  flying a drone with RTL switch.

At least you can get a L2 autopilot kit to drive a honda with no hands. Take a look at http://comma.ai

But, the elixir for the future, really is deep learning?

Average model hobbyist don’t know what computer architecture is, nor what difference between linux kernel and distro. They want to FPV, thus, they will not have “fun of the future”.

YOU WILL NEVER KNOW UNTIL YOU HAVE DONE IT, RIGHT?

“For the future” you will need at least:

• ROS capable SOC platform, a raspberry pi 3 is minimal for CPU, jetson from nVidia is de-facto

• Lidar or TOF camera for depth point cloud, Hokuyo LIDAR, intel RealSense, or old Hokuyo LIDAR, or Garmine Lidar lite with a motor.

• Machine Learning coding/training experience: depends how nerdy you are. Python based platform is popular, you don’t need to worry about stack overflow at least.

A good starting point will be: https://github.com/DJTobias/Cherry-Autonomous-Racecar

Putting this bunch of $2K hardware for a starter, it’s better to roll on wheels on the ground, and makes more sense for developing initial obstacle avoidance algorithm. Well, driving a car to avoid crash by itself, equals crash it purposely, is the future.

Now the stake has been raised. Are you ready?

Now you can get all design files here:

https://github.com/p9x

There's now License claims in these files so do whatever you can with it.

The V1.0 hardware has successfully proved its design, now we are building it even better.

New JST GH IO board is under testing.

We even have customer who's building their own fully functional flight controllers by integrating the mainboard inside.

V1.1 hardware will be available in June 2016, with new features:

• PX4 firmware compatible
• optional JST GH IO board
• optional CNC shell
• New IMU configurations
• bi-directional AUX port (support Lidar lite better)
• anything you are not too late to ask

Thanks for reading this. hope people think they are offended in this thread have a better mood tomorrow, no offence.

http://diydrones.com/profiles/blog/list?user=1q1lje5waqedm

Regards.

Pixhawk is a great autopilot, we love its robustness and rich sets of features. Nowadays it is a de-facto to low cost autonomous vehicle application.

There’re always some changes you want to make in an open source design, this rule also applies to Pixhawk. First, I want to make it smaller, to fit it into a f5B glider fuselage, with built-in dampers and a plastic shell could survive a hard crash. Then I want to make the sensors to be replaceable, so I can test new MEMs gyros. And lastly, I want to make the IO completely customizable to my specific application, eliminating 3-pin RC connectors, better fixture to a larger avionic payload motherboard, or an array of Pixhawks without messy wiring.

So in the last winter, we had it done, named it P9X

Some quick facts about P9X: (might subject to change due to its beta phase)

• 80mm x 50mm x 17.2mm box made of 1.5mm thickness mold injected PC/ABS
• 43mm x 50mm core PCBA size
• Tested with Ardupilot
• Tested with QGC 2.7 version PX4 firmware
• PX4 master built not yet running (maybe a firmware issue)
• Total weight: 45g
• Connectors fully compatible with Pixhawk
• Integrated silicon rubber damper (need help in axle alignment test)
• 4 copper nuts embedded for M3 screw mounting (dimension: 38mm x 25mm)
• IMU sensors swappable (need soldering)

We need your Help!

The first 50pcs batch is out, we have invested in inject mold, silicon rubber mold, silk screen printing. We want more testers and a crowd funding campaign, before that, we want to make sure this hardware revision has no serious design issues. If you are experienced user, developer, embedded engineer, please consider purchase one of these beta samples and send us feedback.

How to get one.

Back in the last year, Raspilot project generated no income, Emlid and Erle Robotic has inspired by its design then they have made their similar design products. I don’t want to bankrupt in my hobby, and make it serious to be a self-employed job. So no more free samples.

I want to sell these 50 pcs unit for 150USD each, with Aramex shipping from Shanghai, China. Please give me feedback about the price.

Thanks.

 Hi, dear Diydrones members, today I’m happy to demo yet another raspberry based Ardupilot compatible flight controller expansinon board design.

Features:

• Pixhawk compatible Power/GPS module interface
• Integrated ublox m8n GNSS module
• CSI camera ribbon compatible PCB profile
• PX4IO forked project for dedicated PWM I/O with STM32 MCU
• Emlid™ Navio+ inspired solution for ardupilot HAL
• FULLY open source software and HARDWARE

Goals:

• Single package for FPV solution
• Yocto distro with minimum firmware footprint
• Deliver in May, 2015

Why we did this because we believe in open sourced project will be a great tool to learn from the best, and to be even better. We are young Chinese engineers, please no stereotype.

I’ve been assist @zhangkaiqi working on this project for a while now. We had a breadboard wiring prototype flying happily now and we want to push this endeavor a litter further. As earlier Navio+ test reports from Emlid shows that PWM consumed about 20% of RPI B+’s cpu time, we want to test another solution by putting PX4IO (pixhawk’s co-processor part) on RPi.And we are inspired by @PatrickDuffy’s (Diydrones member, not twitter) FPV solution on Rpi with ubnt™, so we want to build a flight controller has all the good features we can get from a Rpi, so we combined them together.

Today we have the first PCB design sign-offed to the fab, and later this week hope to have a smoking test (first time power on a PCBA). We hope people with talent to join us with software design process and we hopefully to send some samples to volunteered engineers, testers and early bird costumers.

We promise to open source all project files, including Eagle Cad schematic/layouts, after we have the first batch PCBA running complete. We need initial product generate some revenue to support out later developments.

I’ll update this thread for the project, please commit for your ideas and feature request.

Thanks for people who contributed to this community made this possible. 

Please forgive me sending this Chinese letter to this English community, i'll try to explain what's up, maybe worth a laugh.

sb-dji.com, a website was online maybe not no more than a year, posting(repost) "daily" dji products fails in Chinese drone/RC online communities. The owner of the website did not stated his motivation of setting up this website, but i believe he was a very frustrated DJI customer, as the letter stated "had dispute in customer service".

Today in his  new "daily" post, other than a smashed Phantom or crashing Inspire 1, it's a laywer‘s letter send to the Internet domain name register office whom provided the sb-dji.com's domain name, stating sb-dji.com web site contents  has Reputation infringement to DJI company, and requesting "assistance from the domain service office to shutdown this website in 5 days"

Alright, all the flying alway phantoms ... you will rest in peace.

P.S. sb literally means retarded in chinese (pinyin initials)