APM 2.0 is the culmination of almost a year of hard work. We wanted to make it perfect and we finally have it, we are pushing the limits of AVR and Arduino. I’m sure you will love it, and it’s designed to cover all the DIY community expectations (including those that are not so DIY and are only interested for something that doesn’t require soldering skills).
Check the product listing for availability status!
Main Features
- Three processors--a triple-core autopilot!
- All new state-of-the-art sensors; the first autopilot to use the Invensense 6DoF MPU-6000
- Smaller, lighter, cheaper than APM 1.0--just $199 ready to fly, with GPS, magnetometer and dataflash included.
- Like APM 1.0, this is the world's only Universal Autopilot. The same hardware can autonomously control planes, multicopters, regular helicopters, rovers, even boats, with just a one-click firmware change--no programming required! Best-of-breed mission planning and two-way telemetry, and soon with advanced scripting with Python for robot acrobatics and more.
- Twice as much dataflash memory, with SD card slot
- No soldering required
- When using the internal sensor fusion processor of the MPU-6000, more than half of the Atmega2560 processing capacity is free for new advanced features.
- Native USB, with all new PPM encoder software
New sensors
The big advance in APM 2.0 is the introduction of the Invensense MPU-6000 sensors, which have an internal Digital Motion Processor (DMP) that does advanced sensor fusion. We’ve tested it for months, including lots of flying, and it significantly outperforms the DCM used in APM 1.0. It’s your choice whether you want to use the MPU-6000 internal sensor fusion or do it yourself in the main processor, but if you choose the DMP it frees up nearly 40% of the processing power in the Atmega 2560. This is a digital chip, so we were able to eliminate the ADC chip used in APM 1.0, lowering chip count along with cost and size.
We’ve also upgraded the barometric pressure sensor to the MEAS MS5011, which has a resolution of 10cm! This is at least twice as accurate as the pressure sensor on APM 1.0 and should give ArduCopter best-of-class altitude hold capability. Here are some of our side by side tests conducted by Jose Julio (Spain):
We joke about the color of APM 2.0, we say that is the fusion of ArduPilotMega V1.x (Red board) and the Oilpan/Sensor Shield (Blue board) and resulted to be a purple board. Well this might not be the real reason of the purple color, in fact the APM 2.0 fuses the APM 1.0 and the Oilpan/Sensor board into one, in order to save space and make it cheaper.
Micro daughterboard
But why does it have a small daughterboard with an SD slot, GPS and the magnetometer on top? Aha! The big dilemma I had for months! I was very concerned about leaving the GPS and the Compass stacked on the main board. What will happen to the compass if the board is placed near to big electromagnetic fields like a brushless motor? What will happen if the board is inside a carbon fiber frame and GPS reception is blocked? But what happen if none of those issues matters to you and you want a small board with everything on it? What can I do to solve the necessities of everybody?
So I developed a small shield that can be mounted inside the boundaries of the pins and has special connectors to keep a very low profile of the system, so if you want a small board then you have it! But this shield is optional, so you can still attach your old GPS by using the standard APM V1.0 GPS connector or the classic compass port. But because I promised no soldering I have created a special I2C port (similar to the GPS) that allows you to attach an official APM 2.0 Compass board by just plugging it (yeah just plug and play). The SD slot is there because I had no other place with easy access (underneath the main board was messy and you will be obligated to dismount and flip the entire board to remove the card, you don’t want that right?). In the other hand the daughter board will come in four flavors: GPS+MAG+SD, GPS+SD, MAG+SD and SD. For example if you want to attach only the magnetometer (Compass) externally you just buy the option GPS+SD.
SD card dataflash
The SD slot can read regular SD cards. But for the moment we don’t use them in ArduPlane or Arducopter code because writing regular FAT tables is very slow and can screw up the main loop refresh rate (We’re not using a RTOS yet, and won’t until we migrate to ARM in Q1 next year). There’s why I have created a custom SD card with dataflash on it (twice the capacity of the one in APM 1.0), plus it has the advantage of being removable so you can have multiple logs or you can easily replace it when you exceed the life of the chip. But in case you are planning to use APM 2.0 in something that doesn’t require a 200Hz loops (like a very powerful data logger or weather station) you can interface with a regular SD cards and write text files on them. The possibilities are endless!
The board itself is our first four-layer design and is smaller than APM 1.0 (believe it or not it’s just 2.6 x 1.6 inches, even smaller than the UDB) and this includes four mounting holes and rounded edges to give a nicer look and feel! Of course it’s lead free and ROHS complaint.
New PPM encoder and USB interface
Along with the Atmega2560, there is an Atmega32-U2 that works as the USB (FTDI) serial programmer (Arduino Compatible) and PPM Encoder. This setup allowed us to save even more space and reduce prices by eliminating the FTDI chip in the APM 1.0 board. Best of all, you can update the Atmega32-U2 firmware without buying a SPI programmer; you can easily update via USB!
The Atmega32-U2 also features something called “Serial0 Auto Switch”. This function automatically toggles the serial port 0 from the Atmega2560 from the USB Serial programmer and the modem/OSD port. When you are about to upload a new code through the mission planner or Arduino the Atmega32-U2 will auto-route the Serial0 to the USB Com port and load the code, when is done it will automatically switch it back to the Modem or OSD port. This maximize the usage of this serial port that before was wasted the average of the time (not used while flying). On the APM 1.0 the modem won’t work when is programming and you don’t program anything while you are flying so theirs is virtually no downsides in normal operations. Anyway in case you want a dedicated UART for each you can still switch back to the old APM 1.0 configuration with some solder jumpers.
More I/O
APM 2.0 is also packed with 12 analog pins that can be used as digital I/O pins and three of them can be “solder jumpered” to add extra PWM output channels (for gimbal operations). Each analog/digital pins can be used to read or control special devices like current, RPM, voltage and ultrasonic sensors and output devices like cameras and relay’s. The mission planner will allow you to define in which pins you have connected a device and a drop box will give you the options to select pre-defined sensors or declare a new one (Something similar to Remzibi OSD). This sensors or output devices can be later used in missions and do actions when certain conditions are met (Not implemented yet).
APM 2.0 features 8 PWM outputs (and can be increased to 11 if you give up 3 of your 12 analogs) and 8 PWM inputs. You can also bypass one of the pins with a solder jumper to insert your own PPM signal, still you can use the other PWM inputs left to control something else (so you can have more than 8 inputs).
The +5V servo power is optionally separated from the rest of the board, you can join both powers by insert a regular jumpers. This saves us a lot of problem in some setups. It also features a protection diode to protect the board from reverse polarities. Reset pins are left exposed with ground, so you can add an external reset switch if you wish.
Thanks to the incredible work of the DIY Drones Dev Team, the ArduPlane and ArduCopter code will support the APM 2.0 board when it ships. Special thanks to Pat Hickey, an embedded programmer rock-star, who led the team who ported the code to the new board. Others who worked tirelessly on this include Jose Julio, Andrew Tridgell, Doug Weibel., Randy MacKay, Jason Short, John Arne Birkeland, Olivier Adler, Sandro Benigno, Max Levine the 3DRobotics team and scores of others. It was a huge job!
Special thanks to Chris Anderson for making this possible.
The new code is already in the repository and supports both APM 1.0 and APM 2.0. The Mission Planner will autodetect your board and load the appropriate code (Note: the official 3D Robotics APM 2.0 board has a unique signature and the MP will look for that. Other people can make their own APM 2.0 boards, but the official MP will probably not support them). But if you want to do it manually in Arduino just change this line in Config.h from APM1 to APM2: # define CONFIG_APM_HARDWARE APM_HARDWARE_APM1
APM 1.0 (back) vs APM 2.0 (front)
Price
As you can see the board is more than great! But when you discover the prices you will be double amazed:
APM 2.0 + Daughter board (with all sensors) + 1 x dataflash Card for datalogging + USB micro cable + All pre-soldered and tested for just $399… But we have a special DIYDrones promotion; if you buy it within the next 100 years you only will pay $199.95 (yeah you read it right $199 US Dollars). =P
Seriously. $199 for everything, for everyone, always.
Important note: The board is already available and tested, but with this incredible price you can expect a very high demand (even before formal announcement) so the only way you will be able to get one board soon is by pre-order at the link below. The expected waiting time is from 1 to 6 weeks. First come, first served. We expect to end this delay by February when the shortage of some sensors is over. (We’re going to limit the first batches of board to users; unfortunately we can’t allow distributor sales until customer pre-orders are filled)
Comments
1. What about Paparazzi? Its totally, fully, ultimately,full featured.
2. DJI and MK have full autonymous capability, Aeroquad doent and I know KK has a GPS but ive seen no perormance indicators. Im giessing ypu mean KKMulticopter (black board, lu board, etc) they do not feature in this dialogue.
3. GPS ismt a feature. It's a slab of silicon. Ditto magnetometer. And the gyro/accelerometer etc etc. I'll give you a big bag of those chips in a bag , hundreds of them. And we'll call that a UAZv?
No, loiter, waypoint, altitude hold, RTL, these are fetures. And if they dont work, they shouldnt be claimed. It's a classic technology misconception.
Besides, the marketing talk is to promote the community, and of course drive some sales, so that we can sustain it. I'm sure no one's looking to get rich off this. Just enough to make back some money, and some profit to make the effort worthwhile. No one wants to put hard work and time in, and not get some compensation, whether monetary, or some recognition.
Dave, I think it's more than appropriate. Arduplane and Ardupilot are one the most most full-featured open source, and even closed systems out there. I'm familiar with Aeroquad, KKMulticopter and Arducopter code. Only Arducopter can claim a full set of functionality, like GPS, Magnetormeter, 3-axis gyro accelerometer, and more. So, "full-featured" is not misleading or inappropriate. I can say the same thing for the word, "sophisticated" this is pretty advance code. I've been a programmer for 20 years, and have seen some very advanced code, both embedded, and high level. As for "ultimate", yeah, I think that's a bit of marketing talk. It's only the ultimate for the amount of money I want to spend. If I want to spend more money, I could probably build one even more ULTIMER, than the Arducopter.
Then is it approprate we use words like "Full-featured, most sophisticated and Ultimate"??? Is this typical of similar communities? Is this the language of a commnity of enthusiasts or a marketing department???
Well, as Allen pointed out precisely. There is a major difference between DJI and DIYDrones. The former is a company and customers look to them to improve the product, while DIYDrones is a community, where we look to ourselves to improve the product. If the community is engaged, and healthy we get a good product, as an end result.
Couldn't agree more with Davey. If you do the math, maybe who has started with this 1 year ago, has spent more money than a full eqquiped mikrokopter or a DJI wookong, I believe that's my case, I bought 3 or 4 different frames, lost count of motors and ESCs, 2 autopilot, 2 oilpan, 2 gps, as to props I think I should own my own factory by now lol however, I'm a hobbyist, not doing anything professionally, I often get frustrated because a feature than everyone says is ok, it doesn't work with me, but then I find out why and those 15m I get to fly with everything stable, seem the best of the world. If I was a professional in need of a stable platform for a camera, I would definetly choose a comercial solution available, but I'm not, I'm a Computer Engeneering student and a technician, and I've learned a lot with this project so far. Programming, control, gps positioning, electronics, etc... and I can't put a price on that :) . One thing I must agree. We should be solving problems before putting new features. Ok, so, stabilize is working fine, let's go to alt_hold see what we can do to improve it, next loiter as the first auto feature to be really steady, and so on. Because sometimes, trying to fix or implement a feature wich depends on something not working well... will not bring good results ! If you just want to fly, well, don't update firmware untill you have confirmation on a stable version !
If a lot of people are coming directly into the hobby, then the stability of the project is of utmost importance, especially loiter and altitude hold. While crashing is part of the hobby, it can be incredibly frustrating to put a lot of time and effort into your quadcopter only to have altitude hold fail and come out of your first flight with broken propellers and a bent arm. I feel that for people first learning to fly, altitude hold is probably the absolute most important feature that must work (I feel stability mode has been pretty stable for a good while now). I also feel that alt-hold in particular fluctuates a lot in stability throughout development, even on the APM1 with well-tuned PIDs (I have yet to fly either of my APM2 equipped frames due to the weather being terrible). Sometimes my quad will go from being rock solid when on alt-hold to being subjected to large fluctuations. I've also had issues where loiter caused a large throttle increase which caused a rapid increase in altitude. These scenarios can be recovered by an experienced pilot, but beginners may not be so lucky. We can tout the merits of open source/DIY until the cows come home, but if only the most persistent of new users are successful on our platform, how do we expect the platform to continue to grow?
This is only speaking from the Arducopter side though.
You know, I've never actually read that page? I always seem to be headed to look at code changes or the wiki.
You're right, it could use a little less marketing and a lot more geek!
I dont disagree with your sentiment in any way, I own a lot of copters, and I love nothing more than playing with the Ardu, tweaking PIDs etc. It gets 5 times the airtime my expensive closed source solutions get, and my first experience of DJI was pretty horrible actually. But (isnt there always!):
The DIY Drones development team is proud to bring you the ultimate open source quadcopter and helicopter UAV!
ArduCopter's autopilot is based on ArduPilot Mega (APM), the most sophisticated IMU-based open source autopilot on the market. It provides full UAV functionality, with scripted waypoints, Ground Station and more.
This are the first lines on the splash page of the Arducopter googlecode page. Say you'd never flown RC, or even knew what OpenSource meant. Wouldn't you be psyched? I think we are seeing a lot of people entering the hobby not by Traditional RC > RC Groups > DIY Drones but straight in. Maybe The splash page should say "If youre willing to put in the hours, learn a bit of control theory, learn a bit of embedded C, and crash, a lot, you too can enjoy the spoils of automated copterism". Are we beingobjective about where we are with this project?
Just a thought.
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