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Pixhawk is Ready for Takeoff

Posted by Sue Rosenstock on December 12, 2013 at 2:00pm

3689562888?profile=originalAfter 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.

Tags: iris, iris-developer, pixhawk, community
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Comments

  • Cosha December 13, 2013 at 6:37am
    Can i ask why the APM 2.6 is not being made anymore?

    For persons like myself who just want to have a reliable autopilot without to many bells and whistles? Stopping production of these boards to me is shooting yourself in the foot business wise. There will be a huge gap in the market for thouse who are happy without having to upgade and double the price for the same features we will use on the Pix!

    Any ideas?
  • Balloon December 13, 2013 at 6:05am

    I still wait it for ship to me..... TT_TT 

  • Neuro December 13, 2013 at 6:04am
    Google Nexus7 $229.00 at best buy....
  • titeuf007 December 13, 2013 at 5:30am

    this board is so big for small frame

    does it have sensors like dji to reduce noisy vibration

  • Admin
    Thomas J Coyle III December 13, 2013 at 5:18am

    @Josh,

    As far as the APM is concerned, it has run out of memory space for the addition of any future Arducopter functionality and its computational speed is being pushed to the limit. I do not know about the Arduplane code, but there is still some program storage room left for adding additional functionality to the ArduRover code.

    However, it is time to move ahead to processors with faster computational speeds and more program storage space than the Atmel 2560 mcus. Object recognition and Optical Flow processing is going to take the power of more powerful processors and I suspect that we will be running navigation systems on BeagleBone style mcus that run Linux.

    Regards,

    TCIII ArduRover2 Developer

  • Developer
    John Arne Birkeland December 13, 2013 at 2:25am

    @Jouni, I kinda agree with you about the new system being a low end 32bit choice, but I think the idea is to make the step smaller and more manageable. Going from a monolithic 8-bit system to a full fledged modern multi core&thread system can be daunting. The chosen STM32 and RTOS, makes for smaller steps then going all out.

    But that being said. APM software is aiming to be future proof and as portable as possible. There already is generic Linux support in the works, and Beagleboard and Raspberry Pi HW brances being worked on.

  • Jouni Helminen December 13, 2013 at 1:58am

    I think some of the guys have a point, if going for something more powerful why not go all the way and get a modern mobile phone ARM SoC from someone like Qualcomm or Mediatek? Instead of 157mhz Pixhawk you'd get 1.5ghz quad core, plenty of RAM, GPU beefy enough to do optical flow without breaking a sweat, you could do heavy data processing on the air, you get the networking stack, wifi and 4G for free, the list goes on. The prices are very competitive too - you can get 4 core phone for like $150, and that includes screen, battery, covers, everything. For flight controller purposes the BOM would be very low.

    New mobile phones are pretty much the equivalent of computers a couple of years ago in terms of processing power, why not put them on drones, you can run a full web server on them, leverage the huge linux/web dev community. See what people are doing with a familiar stack like node.js on Parrot AR - give people familiar technology and you'll see a huge increase in overall development.

    For my day job I work at Canonical designing Ubuntu for mobile products, we have a full fledged desktop/server Unix running on little ARM SoC's. The mobile industry is aggressively bringing the prices down and processing power up, it would make sense to ride the same wave. If anyone wants to have a further chat, PM me

  • Cosha December 13, 2013 at 12:41am
    I think I will wait a year before buying a Pix! Hopefully by then they will be cheaper and all the bugs worked out!

    I have been bitten so many times with new releases over the years and im not clever enough yet to de bug!

    Good work on getting it out so quickly!
  • Moderator
    Gary Mortimer December 12, 2013 at 11:14pm

    The IRIS developers have been flying them for a while and knocking the square corners off, I don't think the learning experience will be as steep but obviously there will be some.

    Moving to a more capable processor will lead to more sensors that can help keep things upright and in the blue portion rather than upside down in the green.

  • Joshua Johnson December 12, 2013 at 11:12pm

    @P Jenness,  Contorary to what Gary said I believe that the APM hasn't run out of steam yet and think that the APM was a great choice for someone who is just entering into the industry.

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