When I became a test pilot of my father, I’m started to manipulate the Drones and the PX4. I’m is doing the test of the performance of the flight, aerial data adjustments and offer the informations for the customization of flight controller.
My father was a fighter pilot, was a engineer of the Embedded Linux operating system, now, he is a director of documentaries and a photographer. He’s documentary “UAV on the Amazon river” (Link: http://diydrones.com/profiles/blogs/uav-on-the-amazon-river) is about the Drones, it contain 24 Drones (FPV personage Drones), and is used Drones aerial filming.
The filming will be done at Amazon tropical forests. And the biggest problem for Drones in this location is a interference from the plants and the Earth’s magnetic field, in this case, rely solely on GPS will bring many unexpected. Build a Drone that can adapt that location is the focus of planning for this documentary. And this was a very difficult and time-consuming development and customization. Its took us three years, we tested 9 type of the commercial flight controller (Example: DJI, Hoverfly, and more) and 11 types of frames (OCTA, HEXA, X8, Y6, QUAD), and we decided to use the PX4 and the Y6 frame.
The PX4 has many connectors, thus allowing our Drone to utilize the intelligent optical flow camera (PX4Flow) to hold position, calculate the distance with LIDA (Light Detection And Ranging) and guiding with ADF (Automatic Direction Finding). The PX4 is offering many resolutions to complete the difficult debug, example: Auto-Tune and Diary Viewer.
For one commercial flight controller, the manufacturer is only offer the information about the controller, any defect or specification have to wait the next update or buy one customized specially for you. The PX4 have a operating system with an advanced calculation form, and you can customizing it according your necessity.
The commercial flight controllers is more easy to use and has a basic function, likes a Windows, suddenly he gets the blue screen or incompatibility, but the commercial flight controllers has a interference or without the control.
The users of the Open-Source Hardware flight controller requires an ability to develop and debug, likes a Linux of that era, with customization assumed for professional and high quality activities.
My opinion is the Open-Source Hardware flight controllers and commercial controllers are different market. For normal users and the simple missions, the first choose is a commercial flight controller. For advanced users and the professional missions, the choosing is one Open-Source Hardware flight controller, even these advanced users have started with a commercial controller, will quickly switch to an Open-Source Hardware controller. The Open-Source Hardware flight controllers has a great market and potential, and what define whether this market is active or not will be the customizations services.
