Speaking of Chinese companies selling open source hardware for half price, Multicopter News reports that HobbyKing is preparing to sell the popular KK multicopter controller board for as little as $50. Note that this is just a RC controller board, not a UAV autopilot, but it's excellent by all accounts and IMHO this wide and inexpensive availability is great news for the community (although note below that they may not have made the best hardware choice on the microprocessor).
The price (based on the facebook page comments) is to be under $50USD , under half the price the KKuk boards are currently selling for
They quote that they have spent alot of time testing and on QC…… interesting to note its using the older atmega 48 chip, which will limit its software options to the originals done by Kapteinkuk .KKuk Official Site which is a shame, as the Atmega 328/168 is the chip of choice, allowing bigger firmware code to be run, such as that done by Mike Barton XX Rc Groups Thread and also Minsoo Kim from KKmulticopter.kr which includes H6 and airplane configurations.
The KKuk board started here Original Thread on RCG
This will be interesting to watch, to see if it is a positive for the KKuk community, making hardware more affordable, or if it is a negative, as the programmers loose the incentive to improve their product
Comments
"As I see, this board lacks accelerometers and it seems to do just fine.Do you think accelerometers are a must for a copter?"
Having the acc's will let it self hover, solidly. Otherwise, you'll be constantly adjusting/trimming. Many here (as well as myself) have created multicopters using just mixers and such or with one acc, and boy it was hard to hover but still fly-able.
@Bob Hern, they talked about quality testing on one of their blog or forum posts... basically they're having to build a test rig so that when a KK board is assembled it can be hooked up and verified. It's the individual boards being tested, not the design.
Although the idea of hundreds of QA staff hooking up boards to quads and flying them around at the same time is very appealing to me.
Just IMHO, it sounds like a good deal all around:
- People interested in trying out multicopters get a low-cost entry system
- HK sells 4x motors and escs
- Rolf Bakke is getting a cut from each board
- Other multicopter board makers have an expanded base for higher-end or more performant boards.
The KKmulticopter uses 3 piezoelectric murata gyros in most of its incarnations. While these are pretty robust and vibration resistant, they are affected by "drift" after a little while. The lack of accelerometers means that it is not able to "self level" like other controllers that have these on board. However for a starter controller it is excellent as it has only three variables for the user to adjust. The gyro gain for roll, pitch and yaw dials. It is also excellent as a sports flyer controller as it is so responsive.
The move by HK to use Atmega48P on the board means that their version will not be able to use the current expanded firmware by Mike Barton and Minsoo Kim which includes safety features and higher refresh rates that give the more advanced boards that extra stability in hover and extra responsiveness in sports mode.
There are a number of improvements to this controller that have been on the cards for some time, and that may not be shared with people like HK thanks to their mercenary behaviour and lack of interaction with the core community. At the end of the day you get what you pay for, and if you want a cheap knock off with no support and no upgrade-ability, I guess you know where to go.