Well, it had a very nice home in any case!
Iām going to stick up for the F4 boards from manufacturers like Matek. Their F405 boards can make a great budget friendly option for somebody trying out their first build if they are willing to solder. Yes, they are going to be feature limited, I agree 100%, but for somebody who just wantās to get their feet wet in Ardupilot this can be a good way. Iād rather see a new-comer here with a F405-VTOL than a clone 2.4.8. At least this way they know what they have.
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We may want to make this note a bit more prominent, though I fear it will be lost in the sauce because marketing wank always wins over actual documentationā¦
due to flash memory limitations, most F4 based, and some other boards, do not include all ArduPilot features. See Firmware Limitations for details.
As long as expectations are set properly, I suppose I can concede that F4 boards have a place. I just see a lot of sob stories when folks realize theyāve invested hours and dollars into a board that will never meet their goals.
Likewise. Wouldnāt hesitate to use another of these.
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"Well, it had a very nice home in any case! "
Thank you! When my grandson see it on the shelf he wants to have me fly it.
Octo leaf blower. 960 kv, fat shark, folding radio legs,Ski radio 914, exterior USB/led connector and good custom flashed escās if i recall.
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Agreed. I think there are plenty of users in the community that can get the experience they are looking for with a good quality F4 board. Especially for their first builds. But unfortunately there are always the loud ones who canāt figure out why the drone they built (or tried to build) with the cheapest Ali-express parts doesnāt live up to their expectations of out performing the latest DJI whatever. No helping that.
The beaglebone blue should be added to this list. itās not something your getting working first time out.
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There is nothing wrong with a GENUINE - I said GENUINE - Pixhawk. I have had several work reliably for years.
I have also bought Pixhawk clones for Ā£35 pre-pandemic off ebay and both of those broke in some way or other. I would absolutely not buy a clone.
As for how you tell the differenceā¦ buy from a reliable supplier. A genuine Pixhawk costs Ā£95 here:
On the same website you are talking Ā£350 for a Pixhawk Orange. 
The only genuine pixhawks were the boards made by 3DR and those havenāt been made in about 8 years.
even that one you linked to is just a 2.4.8 in a different case
from their site: " Please note that due to global chip shortages our current back of Unmanned Pixhawk boards are based off the 2.4.8 version (when we usually stock 2.4.7 version)
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Right. I think Mro was producing some for awhile and because Mr. MuƱoz was a co-founder of 3DR they could make a legitimate original claim. As they could with Pixracer because they have the blessing of the creator of those Mr. Kocmoud.
I donāt know what a Pixhawk 2.4.7 is.
They stopped making them about 5 years ago. they sell the pixracer for Ā£350 I wouldnt call it an alternative at that price.
generally, the higher the number, the cheaper the components.
The main thing about the pixhawk that it has going for it is nothing technical but the documentation, there are setup guides in just about every language. sure there are technically better controllers but nothing as well documented apart from the original APM. and i think thats what drives people towards these older controllers.
No. The customer base may be the same as one who would buy a Cube Blue. For a particular market segment I suppose it makes good sense.
I still maintain that buying a Pixhawk from a reliable supplier is the ideal cheap way to start off in drones. Ā£350 is out of reach for normal people who just want to experiment.
But they are all the same unless there is some old stock. I suppose for the purposes of return when it craps outā¦
Put in a bid!
eBay Pixhawk
ebay Pixhawk
I have 3x second hand Pixhawks, all running fine after 4 years.
I have 2x Pixhawk clones, both failed after about 1 year or less each.
And I argue back that a Matek H743 variant costs a pittance more (sometimes less, depending on the scam level of the āPixhawkā) and eases almost all frustration. Iād sooner solder and even re-solder than re-pin a tiny JST, DF, or Molex connector.
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Yuri, I agree with everything your saying for somone that can solder but I worked in a shop selling drones and components to first time fliers for 4 years and the soldering was the number one reason for failure. All it takes is one little short and they can destoy everything. Thats why these kits sell so well as soldering a major obstacle to most peoples first time builds.
Pixhawks are also still the best documented controllers for ardupilot, you can get a setup video on youtube in just about every language.
Awesome Post. Thanks for such good info.
āLive long and Prosperā
I got a good laugh from this thread. Thanks! 
The list of hardware not to use describes my drone pretty well, starting with the F450 frame and continuing to the Pixhawk 2.4.8. At least my motors donāt have those removable collets and are of a different color, but otherwise probably no better. And my ESCs are decent.
I bought those parts for my first drone because they were cheap and effective. I never liked the F450, but simply there wasnāt any other frame of that size that didnāt cost at least 10 times as much. And the Pixhawk clone was sold in a kit with pretty much everything needed, and even some parts I did not need. And it works just fine! Including the GPS. The only part of my Pixhawk kit that was too bad for use was the included microSD card, which was labelled as 16GB, reported as such to the system, but only had about a quarter gigabyte of actual memory. Whatever the Pixhawk wrote into it beyond that mark, was written into thin air. So I replaced that microSD by a decent one.
I think that itās not a good idea to steer beginners away from low-cost parts. I got into drones only when I found parts that were cheap enough! I simply wouldnāt have gotten into drones, if I had needed to pay several times as much as I did.
Now my drone is over 3 years old, and still flying well. With those cheap, ābadā, non-recommended parts. Iām far from claiming that there are no better parts available, but at the same time I think that the parts I bought actually delivered the best bang for the buck, when I bought them.
My Pixhawk clone gets power from its power module, also from a BEC that I use to power its servo outputs to be able to use a servo in my payload, and in addition I freely plug in the USB when needed. I have not seen any issues with this. The only point I see that suggests a difference between the power system of the original Pixhawk and my clone, is that the calibration of the 5V voltage sensors is off. Maybe due to a diode drop. The reported voltages are low, while the actual voltages as measured with a multimeter are fine.
The GPS and magnetometer provided in the cheap kit work very well.
My MinimOSD also works well, but I had to properly configure its power supply system, because as it came it was directly joining the external 5V to the internal 5V regulator, which might cause overload of that regulator.
I have been considering building a second, better drone. In that one I would like to use a different flight controller, mainly to save some weight. Replacing the Pixhawk+MinimOSD+power module by a single small board would save a significant amount of weight. After all, every gram counts! More importantly, I would like to replace the very ugly, somewhat heavy, and not very stiff F450 frame by an elegant, featherlight and stiff monocoque frame, possibly made from carbon fiber. But the available carbon fiber frames, cobbled together from pieces of carbon fiber plate and tubing, using several dozen screws, donāt appeal to me. So, finding (or making!) a good frame would be the starting point for a new drone project for me.
If I had to write a list of hardware not to use, it would include these:
-
Donāt use any analog camera and VTX. All of them give extremely blurry images, because they cannot have any more resolution than either the American TV signal standard from 1941 (having 525 total lines in an interlaced scan), or the European standard from 1948 (625 lines, also interlaced). And many FPV cameras donāt even properly do the interlacing, but instead simply transmit at half the line rate and twice the frame rate! So we end up with 240 or 288 visible scan lines on the screen, and this simply doesnāt cut it, in an age when video is expected to have at least 1080 lines, to be perceived as crisp.
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Donāt use any camera that does not allow manual setting of white balance. All cameras offer automatic white balance, which results in horrible color shifts as the camera looks at varying scenes, and totally incorrect color when looking at a scene where one color predominates. For example a forest canopy turns grayish, and any nearby rocks look violet. Automatic white balance is a huge nuisance, and if a camera does not allow to turn it off, donāt buy that camera!
-
Check the actual resolution of the sensor. A camera advertised as āfull HDā, but having a 2 megapixel sensor, just isnāt a full HD camera! Because a full HD image has about two million FULL COLOR pixels, while a 2MP camera has just two million SINGLE COLOR pixels. So a 1920x1080 image obtained from a 2MP sensor is always an interpolated image, and doesnāt have the true quality of full HD. Since cameras usually have two green pixels for every red and blue pixels, you need 4 camera pixels to make up a full color pixel. This means that an 8MP sensor is the minimum to allow producing a true full HD image. And that requires using no optical lowpass filter, making the camera prone to MoirĆ© interference! If the sensor has a lowpass filter, then well over 8MP are needed. At least 12MP, better 16MP. In this time and age, when even the cheapest smartphones come with 13MP cameras, and which are tiny and lightweight, there is no good reason to use any less in drones.
Of course all these anti-recommendations of low grade video systems apply only if you are interested in high quality video. If you donāt mind not being able to tell a cow from a car, use analog video and be happy.
- Donāt buy heavy frames. A frame is dead weight, and directly costs you flight time. If you want a long flight time, try to get a frame so light that the battery is at least on half of the droneās total weight. If that frame will not survive a crash, so what? Just learn to fly properly! Accidents can still happen, of course, but they will be rare. I learned flying, and have been flying for a few years, without ever crashing. Iās better having to fix or replace a damaged frame if a freak accident happens, then to always fly with a stupidly heavy frame.
Of course, cost is always a factor. Many of us will still buy low performance parts, because they are affordable. Itās better to play with a low performance drone, than to watch other people playing with their expensive ones!
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The F450 frame is well known as a piece of garbage. A quick scan through Amazon shows that you can buy a full carbon frame for about the same cost and likely get much better results.
Likewise with the cheap knock-off autopilots - you can do better at roughly the same cost.
So, avoid the crap and spend wisely. Thatās the point of this discussion.
While your points about cameras are reasonable, Iād recommend skipping the camera entirely for a first build. Just get the damn thing flying. Worry about the rest later.