The video below (enable audio!) shows a detailed overview of the new Pixracer flight controller.
It is the 4th generation of the Pixhawk flight controller family (make: FMUv4) and like the first generations designed by the Pixhawk Open Hardware team in collaboration with an international dev team. It supports the PX4 and APM flight stacks. If you like to try PX4 on it, follow the user guide.
Comments
Brilliant !!
Boards are getting smaller and more powerful day by day :-)
Keep it up.
Simon
Dear Folks,
I got one pixracer and the power distribution sitting here on my desk.
btw it comes with a rich assortment of cables, which enables you to hookup a wide range of receivers (spektrum satelite, ppm, sbus, included here is one cable on the breakout for rssi in). Also the cable for gps/compass (3dr combo) and the power distribution is included, which reports voltage and amp.
One of the highlights for me is, that the pixracer has a dedicated frsky telemetry port, where you can get all the telemetry from the flightstack to the taranis, which i find very handy.
In general, I think this controller has a great future, especially in regards of the now overall starting national regulation of uavs. Here in switzerland all copters below 500gr are exempt from special regulations, and to my understanding this is true also for germany and the us of a.
So this might give us back a degree of freedom, which for heavier multirotors is now vanishing.
Great Work!
Many Many Thanks to the Pixracer dev-team
It can be a perfect companion for the Raspberry pi Zero as well, got to shrink my connectors, tools and soldering iron and learn to how work under a microscope now :-)
I think when Pixhawk 2 is released most of this confusions are going to be resolved!
@Tobias There are many users which want just this one additional thing - one more CAN port, one more I2C port, one more ADC. But this board has been built for small quads and planes. If we add all the one-mores, we end up with Pixhawk, which is why I recommend its use.
thanks for the comment PX4. I thought, though, that the trend is towards using a companion computer to talk to cameras etc. Also makes sense to use a full size pixhawk for this, but it would be nice to have one FC that can do it all. It'd be only one more PWM out...
@turdsurfer: There are enough single-use FPV racing boards out there. If you really think that's needed you're free to use one of those. From an engineering perspective doing FPV racing on Pixracer is like using a Smartphone to run a pocket calculator: The performance is not limited by the hardware. I can easily see that PX4 and ACM might not have yet the perfect flight modes and set up for racing, but there is nothing from a hardware or software perspective that would obstruct getting there.
Very nice! It'll allow for full fledged autopilots in tiny airframes, but I really doubt it'll come close to matching the performance of the boards such as naze32 with Cleanflight with their tight and constant loops and rapid ESC updates (using OneShot125), simply due to the way the firmware is designed.
I've hinted at this before elsewhere long ago, that it is possible to have the best of both worlds by modularising the firmware and hardware design into 2 main parts: a lean-and-mean flight controller that does nothing more than a naze32 with a constant and tight loop time, and a 2nd board that contains the brains (GPS, navigation code, gimbal control, telemetry, etc), that controls/flies the aforementioned board via SBUS (or similar) much like a pilot would.
I said 2 boards, but obviously it could also be 1 board with 2 processing units.
Hopefully that'll appear on the scene one day, but it'll require major changes to both hard and software design. More like a new (forked) project altogether.
If I had spare time I'd probably attempt it myself, but unfortunately I have a chronic shortage of spare time.
@crady
Yes it is supposed to ship with cables.
Do the boards ship with cables?
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