After months of rigorous testing, we are pleased to announce that our Pixhawk autopilot is now in production and ready to ship.
Designed by the PX4 open-hardware project and manufactured by 3D Robotics, Pixhawk delivers industry-leading performance and flexibility for controlling any autonomous vehicle.
Our new Pixhawk represents a significant improvement over our standard APMs, offering enhanced reliability, robust power, a broad range of USB power options and a second sensor port – for a dual IMU system. The second sensor chip not only provides redundancy, but enables the combination of different sensor inputs.
This release follows months of beta-testing by the IRIS-Developer community. Based on their feedback, we improved the noise immunity of the power supplies and added the MPU 6000 to supplement the LSM303D accelerometer.
We are grateful to the community for their valuable feedback.
Comments
And it comes with a crashbox!
We received one of the Pixhawks with our beta IRIS and it really has amazing potential. The thought that went into all the new connector ports, the buzzer, arm button and everything else really makes for a greatly improved user experience. Going back to the APM2.6 afterwards was so painful. It is a huge leap forward from the APM2.6 and has an amazing amount of extra horsepower for future development. Is the software as reliable as the 2.6 right now, no definitely not, but it shouldn't be expected to. Any software requires hours and hours of testing and the 2.6 has way more flight hours than the PX4/Pixhawk does right now. I'm very thankful that ETH Zurich and 3DRobotics had the forsight to make a substantial leap forward and take the risks that are inherent in such a leap.
You can't compare massively produced consumer items with items destined for a niche market, Neuro. The scales are different.
Neuro:
Bottled water is expensive , because it is free, just open your tap at home. Seriously you cant compare different items against each other when they are so different. There was a story about some of the cameras use on their mars rovers, and they have lower mega pixels than consumer cameras and cost 6 figures. Of course im oversimplifying and i dont know all the differences, but who am i to tell NASA they dont know what they are buying. The APM is not mass market so the economies of scale dont apply.
well u could buy 2 APM 2.5 for that price and have just as much fun..... it just seems high considering it runs the same software in the hobby sense ....... I just think it is a little expensive for the diy hobbyist... I just don't understand what justifys the cost when there isn't any crazy new technology, I'm posting this from a quad core tablet with 2 gigs of ram and a host of other sensors and technology running open soarce android OS and it cost half the price of pixhawk I think things should be priced according to value of components , even more so if Its open source.......with less development cost.…..it just seems silly its kinda like how apple can sell you the same iPhone every quarter in a new case ........ with slight improvements I'd love to own a pixhawk just for the average middle class hobbyist I think its expensive , u got Xbox one for 499 seems cheap considering the tech inside that ......
@darrel , Darrel as I stated this is a hobby , and as such I'm not talking about professional grade controllers such as the wookong , APM is hobby grade as such it is priced according even the gen 1 phantom proves to be a very stable platform and it is considered hobby grade thus its controller is priced a lot less than a wookong controller , also most expensive controllers aren't open source hardware where the end user has to weight the risk every time they fly , big expensive controller manufacturers have payed beta testers and developers big bucks to ensure the best possible performance , to me that justifys the high price.
Any status on Pixhawk accessories? I am eagerly awaiting the digital airspeed sensor :)
Tridge has already added support for failover for accelerometer, gyros and compass onto the Pixhawk. That might not make it out for AC3.1 but it'll certainly be in AC3.2. It means that say you're using the external compass on the GPS, if that fails for some reason it fails-over to use the internal compass. It's a bit of a luxury, we don't have inflight failures of sensors all that often but it's an indication of some of the things we're already starting to do with the extra power.
when are the pre-ordered ones shipping?
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