Recent 3DR's move not to sell DIY components & parts anymore, pushes hobbyists and prosumers to diversify their supplier's sources. Like many others in the community, my issue is to find an "as good quality as 3DR" alternative for a Pixhawk board. I started looking around for possible 3DR Pixhawk replacement candidates, with a quality I can trust in my builds.
There exist myriads of different "Pixhawk" equivalent boards. Most of them are not direct drop-in replacements as they are equipped with different connectors and have different sizes and shapes. Furthermore, most of them do not share the same quantity and redundancy of sensors (i..e.: two gyro, two accel, compass, baro, etc). A direct drop-in replacement is essential for prosumers and professionals trying to standardize parts, connections and components to a maximum.
Then, I was kindly requested by Gearbest to review some of their new FPV racer quad; offer which I declined being a very poor racer pilot (wouldn't have made justice to their fpv quad), proposing them instead to review their Pixhawk board which looked to be an exact match for 3DR Pixhawk board on all aspects: schematics, size, shape, connectors, etc.
This is what this video is about : a test, review and comparison of Gearbest's Pixhawk (versus 3DR's Pixhawk).
Hope this will provide some useful info for who's looking for Pixhawk flight controllers.
Cheers,
Hugues
Comments
Yes, Gearbest listened to my remarks and updated the chip. I did an updated review on the latest version here: https://youtu.be/ryr29fXja9Q
I received one of the pixhawks from gear best... On it it says bzuav.com, but just a quick update for other people who want to try this out, The version I have does have the V3 processor and does not have the 1mb flash limit. The one Hugues received and reviewed has the 1mb flash limit, however, mine which was purchased in June and shipped in July, has the latest version chip and no issue with the Flash limit.
I agree with Gary, feels like it's slipping away.
@Gary
Sure, that's why any commercial operation shouldn't be dependent on one single product, there should be options. And 3DR has announced phasing out DIY products in November, are you saying there hasn't been sufficient time for any commercial operation to find and test other options?
Besides availability, what don't you know about Pixhawk 2? It's the same as Pixhawk 1... One more info I haven't written before: it will have JST-GH connectors.
Now, you have made some other statements that have nothing to do with what we were discussing but let me address some of them:
- why are comparing Pixhawk boards with Solo or Phantoms? Those are RTF products...
- why are you comparing a year old Solo with a brand new DJI P4?
I've never seen that written, but how is that not true? You can deploy your version of ArduPilot if you want, you can write scripts to deploy in the Linux onboard CPU, you can write scripts to run on the controller, you can write scripts or apps that run in your phone or your PC and send commands to Solo.
I haven't been long enough to know, but, from all I have read in multiple places, I'm sure there are people that would dispute that first part.
Do you really expect that a free software software development moves at the same pace than companies with millions to invest? From the moment something goes mainstream and you have economies of scale, it's normal that companies taking advantage of that make much more advances in the technology than small companies or groups of people.
Wait, if you are a company choosing an RTF product why are you worried about Pixhawk availability? That's a problem for the company selling you the RTF...
I actually still use my APM 2.6 more than my Pixhawk. Wish the development hadn't stopped on it. There are still some things that could be fixed in the APM firmware to make it better.
Hi Francisco,
A new Pixhawk with as yet undisclosed deletions of any kind can easily be an unacceptable solution for Commercial operations to depend on for their now and future use.
And from what has been said it appears that this is the case at least regarding 3DRs current commitment.
I absolutely DO NOT know all about it "except it's availability".
I do not know what they have decided to include or not include and as such, it is a genuine unknown and that is not an asset.
And as for the multitudinous Pixhawk clones now emerging, DIYDrones members have a long and often unpleasant history with them, both being hardware inferior and failing in use and being not quite APM code compatible.
Of course, those problems always show up at the worst possible times and are not at all easy to predict or foresee.
The actual gist of this whole line of discussion is that it gives a serious edge to manufacturers who have fully vetted all of their own products from the beginning and foremost among them, clearly DJI whose new Phantom 4 Pro scored first and several points ahead of the 3DR Solo in Maker Magazines recent "Drone Shootout".
And the main Pro for the Solo was that "it is really good for people who wanted to tinker with their own code". - their words not mine.
Don't get me wrong, I think the Solo is a dynamite platform and more is yet to come.
But we (DIYDrones people) are already 1 generation behind that and the distance now seems to be widening.
For several years we were the absolute leaders in innovation and technology, now we are noticeably behind the curve and slipping further every month.
In a very real sense, the most significant new contributions "vision, sophisticated autonomous ciontrol and obstacle avoidance have "gone dark" and are no longer immediately available open source.
I know Randy is working on that, but DJI and to a lesser degree Yuneec have optical or sonar obstacle avoidance and the Solo has very sophisticated autonomous control and they all work considerably better than what we have available.
These companies are planning for the future, currently it seems like we are standing still or at least moving much more slowly into that same future.
If I were planning on starting a commercial enterprise I would look 10 times more seriously at those companies commercially available copters and frankly as a newbe or hobbyist, you are probably way better off going with them too.
I greatly fear we have been shifted from the front of the bus to the back.
Best Regards,
Gary
@Gary
I guess I didn't clarify anything for you? You said you have no idea what is coming. You know all about Pixhawk 2 except availability (it's predicted to July, but not set in stone). You don't know exactly what the board from 3DR is, but you know it's a derivation from Pixhawk 1. Again, no knowledge of availability.
How so? You mean there would be a gap of Pixhawks right? Like I said, ArduPilot works on other boards that have basically the same capabilities - what are you missing on those?
I agree a business needs to have a stable platform, but to do that you either need an agreement with a manufacturer of a product based on that platform (and even then they can just enter bankruptcy from one day to the other) or you need to have other options based on the same platform.
Hi Francisco,
The situation is either confusing or inadequate depending on how you look at it.
It is confusing because we really have no idea what is coming and it is inadequate because what we do "know" seems to indicate that there will or could be a capability gap in availability of autopilots that at least include all of the current capabilities.
Of course, if you are willing to and can verify operationality of the myriad PX4 clones that have sprung up or you can make and test your own boards, it may not be significant problem.
And at the rate these things are evolving, in some sense we are already talking about a dinosaur.
But, especially for commercial use, the one thing you really need to have is a guaranteed stable platform in order for it to be worth investing your own money and time into it.
The PX4 is currently the best example of that period.
So in this case what we don't know about it's survival / evolution really can hurt us.
And Rob,
While I wasn't up the food chain as high as you were, I was there as the APM evolved and as the Pixhawk adoption occured.
And I do remember that there was a great deal more information flowing about what was going on then regarding the adoption and development of these platforms between the devs and the unwashed DIYD public than seems to be now.
Randy and Tridge are still maintaining very good communication regarding developments using the existing Pixhawk platform including with add on micros.
But as for whats coming the situation is less clear.
Best Regards,
Gary
@Francisco. Phew. Glad you cleared up all that confusion!
@Rob
From the Pixhawk website (https://pixhawk.org/start): "Pixhawk is an independent, open-hardware project aiming at providing high-end autopilot hardware to the academic, hobby and industrial communities at low costs and high availability". So you saying that Pixhawk is the V2 hardware autopilot isn't exactly correct. Yes, it is named the same, and yes, that is what most people will associate it with. But that's why I said that you can't read a sentence alone, you have to read the full statement.
Also, saying Pixhawk and Pixhawks is different. My example of Samsung also used the plural, not just Galaxy S, but Galaxy S's.
I didn't say we knew when it was coming out, we don't. But that is something we know we don't know, there's no confusion. We don't have a timeline for the new 3DR board or the Pixhawk 2. Also, yes, we don't know which ports will be removed from the 3DR board - but I also didn't say we did.
What I said is that there's no confusion regarding what 3DR will do with Pixhawk: stop selling Pixhawk 1 when stock ends, start selling new Pixhawk board (which we still don't know the specs).
By the way, Pixracer is PX4 V4. I guess V3 was supposed to be Pixhawk 2, but then they decided to make it fully compatible with V2.
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