Blogs

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
E-mail me when people leave their comments –
Follow

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

Join diydrones

Comments

  • MD January 14, 2014 at 8:18am
    Chris. I never thought that was not the case. I ordered within the first few days of the announcement. I was simply excited it was on its way. As for my other comment, I think the negativity people are putting out here just needs to stop for my reasons above. Have ordered a few to test. Looking forward to it.
  • Todd Hill January 14, 2014 at 8:17am

    I deleted the post, don't want to nag, but no, he is not a beta tester or developer  He has very little experience setting these things up and operating them.  He is sending me the one he just received overnight.  I am building aircraft for a project on board the USS Yorktown in Charleston.  He is my contact there.  Being a long time member and strong advocate of the Ardupilot project it was a bit frustrating that a customer who placed his order well after me has already gotten his.  

  • 3D Robotics
    Chris Anderson January 14, 2014 at 8:08am
    MD: In general they've been shipping out in the order they were received, with the exception of people who were in the Iris Developer P
    Release program, who got early ones and other beta testers and developers. Was your customer one of those?
  • MD January 14, 2014 at 4:26am
    This may have taken more time to get into peoples hands then was expected or anticipated or even outright told to people but who cares. That's life. Not everything goes to plan and we are talking about a developmental product here. Something that is leaps and bound more powerful and a drastic change from its predecessor. Sure it would have been better to come out sooner and some of us had no choice to utilize other techs in its place because of the delay but again, big picture here. It's out. It's becoming available and it is a substantial leap forward. People should focus on the development of the future (which I think the core developers are and a lot of the community) but the petty and juvenile comments should be put aside. Feel free to comment on your experiences or even your like or dislike of the developmental aspects including the timeframe etc but at the end of the day this is an open source, open platform. Key being open. That means regardless of the comment without it being constructive you have no place here. That won't help anyone and this works well because of the collective because of people being constructive. If you want a change, ask for it. Keep asking for it if it adds value but it's about more than one person here. Nothing is one size fits all. Keep it constructive or keep it away. That's my $0.02.
  • MD January 14, 2014 at 12:12am
    Mine shipped! As of 8:31 pm usps have processed it through their SD facility!
  • iTech January 12, 2014 at 12:59pm

    +1

  • gervais January 12, 2014 at 10:01am

    Good question, Helmut. Without these addons its pretty hard to mount the PIXHAW hidden. Bet we are not the only ones, who need em.

  • Helmut H. January 12, 2014 at 9:48am

    Hello,
    When is the external LED and USB socket available?
    thank you and greetings, Helmut

  • Chet January 10, 2014 at 12:26pm

    Thank you all for the replies

  • Moderator
    Michael Pursifull January 10, 2014 at 9:40am
    It's not so straight forward. If you read the (public) Dev lists, shipping on pixhawk units were placed on hold temporarily, when testing revealed an issue. 3DR and the developer volunteers are working diligently to address the issue.
    The pixhawk hardware is fine, but they found that, in switching to using the SD card vs flash, the SD card's data could become corrupted on power down. Poorer quality SD cards made it a lot worse. This is kinda a bother, since the logs and parameters are stored there, so subsequent power ups and flights would be at risk.
    3DR immediately suspended shipments, sourced better SD cards (no doubt the supply chain had to eat the cards they had) and have been working with the developers on a half dozen methods of reducing this risk of corruption.

    The issue is the same as that faced by most modern computers, what happens if you are writing data as someone pulls the power? Only the underlying OS here, nuttx, as I understand it, does not presently have file system repair tools. Compounded by the existing logging, which is pretty much constantly writing a dozen or more items to logs every second.... And no consistent way for the user to tell the board that it is about to lose power, and you will get some file system inconsistency.

    I suspect that there will likely be a surge of pixhawk shipments as this issues is addressed, since I would guess that pixhawk production is continuing in parallel.

    So it might not be as long as you estimate based on past performance, since it's not (presently/strictly) production speeds that are holding up shipments. All this derived from the Dev list, I speak with no other authority.
This reply was deleted.