Blogs

Pixhawk is Ready for Takeoff

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

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.

iris, iris-developer, pixhawk, community

E-mail me when people leave their comments –

You need to be a member of diydrones to add comments!

Join diydrones

Comments

3D Robotics

Chris Anderson December 14, 2013 at 8:05am

SAA: Optical Flow is already supported (see here). For more sophisticated optical flow control, you can use the PX4Flow board with Pixhawk.
Sedim Al-Araji December 14, 2013 at 7:54am

When and will there be optical flow support for the Pixhawk? This should help in refining the GPS glitch problem and also produce ultra solid loiter. There is also the potential of using it for Alt-Hold refining maybe?
Moderator

Gary Mortimer December 14, 2013 at 7:01am

There is a plan for GPS glitches http://copter.ardupilot.com/wiki/gps-failsafe/
Admin

Thomas J Coyle III December 14, 2013 at 5:12am

@Nikolas K,

The HMC5883L is being replaced by the HMC5983 which has superior resistance to local magnetic fields.

The compass interface to the Pixhawk has to have at least 5/3 vdc, Gnd, SDA, and SCL lines.

I am using a HMC5983 with my PX4 and it works fine.

Regards,

TCIII ArduRover2 Developer
Nikolas K December 14, 2013 at 4:44am

Can anyone tell me if I can get this external compass connected to the Pixhawk and how?! It has 5 pins on it, where as Pixhawk appears to have 4. Thanks
mP1 December 14, 2013 at 4:29am

Just wondering is the deadcat style copter the new layout ? It seems that 3DR have quite the traditional quad and hex for the deadcat.
Brent Alderton December 14, 2013 at 4:09am

Nice vid Randy! Can't wait to get mine to see the differences...
Developer

Randy December 13, 2013 at 11:56pm

Just got mine and swapped out the Pixhawk2.3 that was on my developer Iris for this new version of the Pixhawk (2.4) and the alt hold performance is much improved with the switch back to the MPU6k for the main accel and gyros.
Russkel December 13, 2013 at 10:16pm

My money is on several RC receivers having basic autopilot functions within 5 years. Perhaps running MAVlink with a host of GCS to choose from.

That's a good point. I'd imagine if someone were to release the schematics and firmware, crowds like OrangeRX would have no problem mass producing them. They are already halfway there as some of their Spectrum receivers have built in stabilisation as it is!
Developer

Jason Short December 13, 2013 at 9:48pm

I just flew the latest 3.1 on APM and I can say for a fact that It's the best performing release on APM hardware ever. Knowing what's in store for Pixhawk makes me even more excited...