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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

  • Crashpilot1000 December 13, 2013 at 12:05pm

    I always wonder why arduino was chosen in the first place since STM CPUs aren't more expensive. A "stronger CPU" does not justify a higher price - no way. The pricedifference is below 5€. The only advantage of arduino is that it has that cheesy and useless programming interface where you just press the upload button - end of story.

    So an adeaquate STM based FC that could rival pixhawk (SPI connected sensors) could be done for 90$ (incl.  nice profit). There is no need for several acc (unless you want to control a rocket with acc set to different scales) and there is def. no need for an extra STM for failsafe alone, that is just a hardwarerepresentation of the inability to do stable flightcode. An extra STM may come in handy as man in the middle when doing slow I/O like SD card writes etc and hopefully it is used for that as well.

    For me the Pixhawk smells like rushed betahardware - well we think the ST acc is more advanced and probably better, but we need more time to develop an INS Datafusion for it - well on the other hand we have a working MPU6XXX code  - so solder on both. I would have completely different ideas of how a proper FC should look like - but that's only me. So hype to the pixhawk - rush out and get it. Hopefully the voltage design has been gotten right this time without burning diodes, dying regulators frying the sensorset etc..

  • T3
    Thorsten December 13, 2013 at 10:06am

    Congrats to Chris, everybody involved at 3DR and for sure the ETH team!

  • titeuf007 December 13, 2013 at 9:48am

    what about sensors?are they mounting inside the pcb to reduce vibration like dji ?

    i think it will be great to have more info about it..

  • Cosha December 13, 2013 at 9:36am

    Thanks for the replies! I understand for the need to move forward but i read that production was coming to a stop for APM 2.6!

    Glad to know its not just yet! Im flying mine just fine no need for an upgrade for me atall! Maybe im a bit to dumb for Diydrones as alot of the coding goes over my head!

    Thanks for the ideas about other APs, id rather stay here though and join in the fun rather than be a sheep!

    ....panic over!

  • Rana December 13, 2013 at 8:55am

    John, APM series of Autopilots have an Atmel's Mega series of microcontrollers like ATMega1280 in APM1 and ATMega2560 in APM2 , APM2.5 / 2.6 but since the microcontroller used in PX4 and Pixhawk autopilots is STM32F4 which is 32bit much much powerful microcontroller hence Pixhawk just can not be in APM autopilots.

  • John Moore December 13, 2013 at 8:33am

    So is this the "APM 3" or is there something else coming out?

  • Gary Hunkin December 13, 2013 at 8:32am

    I agree, reduncy is just that dual or triple redundent systems. I believe the additional sensor is for "sensor fusion". This does allow overdetermined nav solutions, a form of redundency....

  • Crashpilot1000 December 13, 2013 at 7:29am

    @Cosha: I think there are a lot of alternatives out there. Since it's open source you can even build your own hardware and rewrite the code for that. I wouldn't rule out Autoquad to soon in the copter arena as well - let's see what they will come up with and at what pricepoint. If the autoquad team is not dead it will have to react in some way. So Pixhawk will shuffle competitors and that's always a good thing.

  • Muhammad Al-Rawi December 13, 2013 at 7:21am

    @Cosha,

    There are simpler alternatives to APM/Pixhawk out there. Feiyu-tech, for example, makes some nice and simple APs that cost less. 

    On a general note, was this this kind of backlash present when APM was phased out for APM2.0? Or when Ardupilot was phased out for APM?

  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson December 13, 2013 at 7:11am

    Cosha: Not sure where you got the idea that APM 2.6 isn't being made anymore, but that's very much not the case. We love it and will continue making it as long as there is demand (of which is there is a lot now). It's very solid platform and works great, and will for years to come. But it's run out of memory for additional features, so future innovation and next-gen performance will be moving to Pixhawk. 

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