quanton flight control

Kenn Sebesta February 3, 2013 at 8:02am

@Guy This is getting severely off-topic, but I am funded by BCI to build a bat-tracking UAS. It seems that there's a lot of us looking into UAVs for wildlife research these days.

FYI, while Freedom is one of our two reference platforms, there are no guarantees that it will ever be available for purchase. The schematics and board layouts will be published, and we will make firm guarantees that the Freedom will always be supported, but Tau Labs has no plans to manufacture them. We want to leave the door open to other businesses to get involved and develop the hardware side.

On the other hand, Quanton is manufactured in Germany on lilvinz's pick-and-place machine, so it can be expected to be always in stock. If he runs low, he has only to make another parts order and the stock will be replenished within weeks.

@Rana. It could, you'd just have to port that part of Tau Labs back to OpenPilot. However, you might find that this is a frustrating experience: one of the reasons we left was because the OP administration has a vitriolic response to any suggestions of using OP software on non-OP boards. That attempt to exert control over all users of the software much goes counter to the idea of open-source. YMMV.

Rana February 3, 2013 at 7:50am

Thanks for the clarity, does the Openpilot firmware also works on this board ?

lilvinz February 3, 2013 at 7:07am

Hi Rana,

it definitely is an F405. I will fix the part name in the schematic.

Thank you for pointing out!

Rana February 3, 2013 at 6:48am

Schematic file gives information that its processor is STM32F10XRXT6, however your blog post says that the processor is STM32F405, what is correct ?

Kenn Sebesta February 3, 2013 at 6:30am

@Guy What are you looking for in the way of a board? As far as processor power and RAM goes, it's the equivalent of the next-gen PixHawk hardware. Or is it software functionality you feel is missing?

If it's software, please don't hesitate to let us know. Tau Labs focuses on providing cutting-edge software for the research and professional market, while encouraging manufacturers to use our software base for wider scale markets. We need to be in tune with what advanced features the manufacturers clients will want, so give us a shout if you feel something is missing. Obviously we can't make promises, but if we hear a lot of people asking for a feature it's a good sign we should look into it some more.

James Cotton February 2, 2013 at 11:50pm

Well anyone that cares to look can check https://github.com/TauLabs/TauLabs/graphs/contributors to see who contributed what and what fraction of the leadership actually left. I won't bother to engage DS.

Well put Buzz.

TauLabs/TauLabs

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CheBuzz February 2, 2013 at 9:29pm

Ha, I do hope most people know what it means to be an internet troll. Well played sir.

Anyway, well done lilvinz.

Gary McCray February 2, 2013 at 5:16pm

I just went through the Open Pilot postings Ick!

Must say doesn't make you want to engage in ANY kind of relationship with them.

Too much good Australian beer I expect. Scary.

Oh well, as you said Kenn, enough said, makes me really happy to be a DIYDrones member.

In any case the Quanton flight controller looks excellent and I sincerely hope we end up with a great Arducopter port of it,

Kenn Sebesta February 2, 2013 at 4:39pm

I got lucky enough to be the first one to receive a Quanton, and can say it's an impressive piece of kit. I like the fact that it bolts right onto my microcopter frame, so all I have to do is get around to dusting off the mikrokopter ESC driver code and I'll be able to give my mikrokopter the upgrade it's been waiting on all these years. The fact that it's using the STM32F4 is just icing on the cake. The FPU microcontroller is letting me do vibration testing with an on-board FFT. (This feature is in review state and will soon go live in the main software.)

There's another feature of the Quanton which I think is really cool, and which isn't show here. The underside of the Quanton breaks out every header's power lead so that the user can apply a solder bridge to power only the pins they want to. That means no more fussing around with removing the power pin from ESCs when building a multicopter. I just solder one bridge and leave the others unconnected.

The same principle applies to the USART ports, although in those cases you can choose 3V or 5V.

I can place videos of flights if people want, although I think lilvinz has that pretty much covered.

@Gary. James and I can both attest to (and provide ample evidence about) OpenPilot's closed community. The bullying, harassment, paranoia, and demonization we experienced is what drove us and seven other key players away from the project. The upshot of this is Tau Labs, which continues the work we did at OpenPilot only in a more democratic environment. However, this is not the proper place to discuss what's now the past, so I'll leave it at that.

James Cotton February 2, 2013 at 4:30pm

Gary - see this for example: http://forums.openpilot.org/topic/13432-diy-openpilot-based-flightc... (mirrored: http://imgur.com/QyQXEIL ). Maybe the culture will change but as one of the lead developers (then) I was really disheartened to see that kind of vitriol at someone who was doing cool things with our code and making it more widely available. The project just directs a lot of hate at people doing things outside of it's control under the guise of "we try do do the right thing and you are hurting the project using our kindness against us" *rolls eyes*.

Turns out when we forked off and relaxed things a lot we get awesome people like Lilvinz also generating a port to the F3 discovery, contributing really quality code, and making great new controllers for everyone.

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quanton flight control

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