Drones anyone?
I am interested in the flight controller you are using or suggest?
Drones anyone?
I am interested in the flight controller you are using or suggest?
What are the design goals?
Any old STM32F7-based FCB supported by Inav should be fine. Even if you plan on using Betaflight, I think it’s wise to keep your options open if you want more advanced autonomy. You’ll probalby want GPS, so make sure there are a couple of spare UARTs, and you probably want a barometer on board too, for more robust altitude sensing.
For ESCs I don’t recommend an all-in-one board with ESCs on the FCB, because it gets expensive–when the magic smoke escapes from either side, both are trashed. Depending on your needs you might prefer a 4-in-1 ESC board stacked with the FCB, or four separate 20-30A ESCs on the arms.
For control link, go with ExpressLRS unless you have a significant inventory of other stuff.
For FPV video link, if you have the budget you can get one of the recent digital FPV systems (DJI, WalkSnail, etc.) which will run you $600-1000 for the camera, transmitter and goggles, or the good old 5.8GHz analog stuff is still cheap as dirt (e.g. $20 camera, $20 VTX board, $100 goggles), and you can get the components from different sources.
Customizable controller for a autogyro drone.
I am looking together with a people to build a long duration long range drone.
Design / Build plan.
Now to Christmas is design and simulation. (very little money, low pay)
Winter Build, controller programming, tuning, camera development. (if successful 4 - 6 people paid) (youtube documentation)
Summer flight, more building tuning etc. (if successful 4 - 6 people paid) (youtube documentation)
The Plan is to use OnShape for the aerodynamic design.
An Engineering coop would be ideal for this role.
To achieve the needed high speed and long rang, I am consider a autogyro drone with modified rotor for high efficient forward flight.
Custom flight controller needed for the autogyro flight control
An F7 board may even be more processing power than you need. I’m using a SpeedyBee F405v4 (ostensibly slower than the F7) for my quad and it’s been fine so far but I could definitely use more serial ports.
I recommend considering ArduPilot as well as INAV and BetaFlight. I don’t have experience with the other two but I know ArduPilot supports a huge list of different vehicle types. Be warned, the documentation is not great for any of these.
Look through the docs for whichever firmware and flight controller combo you choose and make sure it has “black box” logging (ArduPilot calls this dataflash logging, for instance). This will be really helpful for testing/troubleshooting an experimental craft.
For autonomous ops either get a flight controller that has a compass built in, or an external GPS/compass combo module. GPS alone is pretty bad at knowing which direction it’s facing.
For FPV video link, if you have the budget you can get one of the recent digital FPV systems (DJI, WalkSnail, etc.) which will run you $600-1000 for the camera, transmitter and goggles, or the good old 5.8GHz analog stuff is still cheap as dirt (e.g. $20 camera, $20 VTX board, $100 goggles), and you can get the components from different sources.
There is some of this stuff in the “Drone/RC parts” bin at the space. No idea how old or functional any of it is.
If you have the budget and space available, getting a flight controller that’s in an enclosure with connectors for everything will save you a ton of time over a bare PCB that requires soldering:
Not an endorsement, just some examples:
https://holybro.com/collections/autopilot-flight-controllers/flight-controller
Oh… OK then. Good luck!