quanton flight control

I am proud to have the opportunity to announce hardware availability of a new target for TauLabs.

quanton flight control rev. 1 <-- shop site (on stock, worldwide shipping)

System information and components:

STM32F405 32bit arm cortex-m4 cpu with fpu, 192k ram and 1024k flash
invensense MPU6000 3-axis accel and 3-axis gyro sensor
honeywell HMC5883L 3-axis compass
meas-spec MS5611 high precision barometer
32mbit spi flash memory
up to 8 x pwm input, 1 x ppm input, up to 15 x pwm output
up to 5 x uart, 2 x i2c, sbus, dsmx, mini usb, swd
50x50mm board size, 45x45mm mikrokopter style mounting
schematics at http://github.com/taulabs
sourcecode at http://github.com/taulabs
binaries at http://jenkins.taulabs.org
answers at http://thespyd.net/questions
support at https://groups.google.com

For those who don't know about TauLabs, please look here.

OpenPilot firmware on pre release hardware:

https://vimeo.com/51772080
https://vimeo.com/51772080
https://vimeo.com/51776478

TauLabs firmware on final hardware:
https://vimeo.com/58572704
https://vimeo.com/58536514
https://vimeo.com/58536515
https://vimeo.com/58668541

@OlivierD What's neat about autopilots right now is that they've basically become commodity products. You can design the hardware in a weekend, with an extremely good chance of success on the first try. After that, it's all about software. So the boards are amazing, but none of us in the open-source UAV world have the software to match. Look for that to change this year.

@Nobert: Lilvinz is the manufacturer and distributor of the boards, so I guess this is what he wants for the moment. The boards require a small amount of soldering in order to put the headers on, so they're not for people who want to buy-and-fly.

While the board is compatible with our efforts at Tau Labs, it's not sponsored by/released by/certified by us. This is intentional, as we want to see more manufacturers enter the market and solve this perpetual problem of lack of hardware. The manufacturers can duke it out for market share, the same way phone manufacturers do, even though they all use Android. Of course it helps that lilvinz is one of the founding members of Tau Labs, that's his competitive advantage in the market. But Quanton is his so he calls all the shots, without input from us.

@lilvinz: I don't think any of the GPSes using the NEO-6M modules have upgradable firmware. That's why it's so annoying that my 4 OP-GPS units are outdated, even though they have good noise characteristics and the right mounting footprint.

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

Join diydrones

Comments

James Cotton February 19, 2013 at 3:26pm

Of course you can compare it to a tree and as long as you make the appropriate distinctions (one is a tree, one is a flight controller) it is a technically correct comparison :)
James Cotton February 19, 2013 at 3:25pm

Looks good and hopefully you enjoy flying it.

It's probably more appropriate to compare it other boards that have accel/gyro/baro/mag and an F4 designed (eventually) for navgiation, altitude hold, RTH, etc such as Revo and APM. It's bigger than Revo but for that you get 5 USARTs and 16 PWM lines (with selectable power).

CC3D is a sport fly board with an F1 and just gyro/accel. No navigation or altitude hold.
OlivierD. February 6, 2013 at 7:25pm

Kenn, thanks for clarifying what is otherwise a bit complex for noobs to understand with all this new STM32 based hardware popping out left right and center.

About the GPS, do you guys think the 3DR Ublox GPS might be a good contender or is 6H considered outdated for what we need it to do?
Kenn Sebesta February 6, 2013 at 1:13pm

@OlivierD What's neat about autopilots right now is that they've basically become commodity products. You can design the hardware in a weekend, with an extremely good chance of success on the first try. After that, it's all about software. So the boards are amazing, but none of us in the open-source UAV world have the software to match. Look for that to change this year.

@Nobert: Lilvinz is the manufacturer and distributor of the boards, so I guess this is what he wants for the moment. The boards require a small amount of soldering in order to put the headers on, so they're not for people who want to buy-and-fly.

While the board is compatible with our efforts at Tau Labs, it's not sponsored by/released by/certified by us. This is intentional, as we want to see more manufacturers enter the market and solve this perpetual problem of lack of hardware. The manufacturers can duke it out for market share, the same way phone manufacturers do, even though they all use Android. Of course it helps that lilvinz is one of the founding members of Tau Labs, that's his competitive advantage in the market. But Quanton is his so he calls all the shots, without input from us.

@lilvinz: I don't think any of the GPSes using the NEO-6M modules have upgradable firmware. That's why it's so annoying that my 4 OP-GPS units are outdated, even though they have good noise characteristics and the right mounting footprint.
Norbert Machinek February 6, 2013 at 12:53pm

Good job, guys!
Happy to see you've taken huge steps in the right direction.

You should make clear, that the Quanton is comparable to other autopilot boards and NOT to the CCD3 fun flyer FC.

btw: haven't seen a thread at RCG - why not?
If I wasn't kneedeep into other projects I'd def. order one. The board looks great and it's developed by guys who do the "right thing"! ;)
And it's made in good ole Germany what more can you ask for, hehe?

Keep it going - thumbs up!

Norbert
James Cotton February 5, 2013 at 4:37pm

The code supports both UBX and NMEA (selectable at boot time) so it will support a number of GPSs. I'm using the crius-cn-06-gps-receiver-v2-0-module too as jabram on our forums did some comparisons and found it had better performance noise than the last OP-GPS. It's using a more recent U-Blox firmware (which the CN-06 comes with) which supposedly has some improvements. We'll probably have testing results fairly shortly now logging is working robustly.
lilvinz February 5, 2013 at 3:27pm

Regarding GPS i am currently testing crius-cn-06 v2.

Pros: cheap, recent firmware

Cons: firmware not upgradeable

Nav is work in progress
OlivierD. February 5, 2013 at 3:19pm

Thanks Drone Savant, I actually thought it was an OP like board (seeing it uses the OP GCS) but then it would be more like a Revo since it has built in mag which I think CC3D doesn`t (could be wrong). Regardless, if it can stabilize and do Pos/Alt Hold, and it works, I am interested. Watching the development of both the VR board and this one closely, they look amazing and powerful.
lilvinz February 5, 2013 at 7:28am

For the OSX compilation problems i suggest to take a look at wiki.taulabs.org and / or
ask for advice on the forums.taulabs.org.

Pricewise you are comparing apples and pears.
Here are the big differences in terms of parts between Quanton and CC3D:
- STM32F4 chip instead of STM32F1 chip
- HMC5883L instead of nothing
- MS5611 instead of nothing
- 32MBit SPI flash instead of 16MBit SPI flash

In addition to that we have to pay 19% german VAT when shipping to end users regardless of their country. This may change in the future when there will eventually be distributors across the globe. Also i hope to be able to lower production costs by making bigger batches.

I thank you for your purchase and hope you will enjoy Tau Labs and Quanton.
James Cotton February 4, 2013 at 3:16pm

I think most of the people that historically answered those questions have left but there might be new people who can help. You're welcome to ask at forums.taulabs.org or on freenode.net #taulabs

of 9

This reply was deleted.