Auto Pilot Blues

Hardware Pixhawk family
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Hey guys, having a little Auto Pilot and Flight Controller blues. I was trying to set up my pixhawk cube and in the process I accidently snapped of the usc port, tor off the board pads and all. I’m looking for a replacement but can’t find the black cubes anywhere. On the Proficnc web site they no longer have it and suggest the orange cube, however when I read the reviews they aren’t good, I also considered the PX4 but the reviews on that board aren’t good either.

The fact that I have to power the rails on the Pixhawk’s is a bummer, I built step downs, and PMU’s for that but still had problems with signal to the OPTO’s and BEC’s (yes I only had 1 power wire from 1 esc connected, and the others where pulled out and no PMU connected on the BEC setup) , I almost had it when the accident happened. I’ve tried other Autopilots like the Naza lite v2, and even bought a K3A Pro, both bricked cause they don’t like windows 10 (set up and flashed per inrtuctions to the T, no missteps), that makes me hesitant about any of the DJI products, I was thinking about there AG line of autopilots, but that is quite the investment just to have them brick.

The Pixhawk cube I have set up on the JMRRC X1000 works great in ground testing, so I put together the the same set up for the JMRRC Hexi1650. These are AG’s I’m building, My goal is to build them with a raspberry Pi, and play with my own programs instead of GPS. I’ve went over everything, and wiring is good checked everything with the volt meter. I don’t know if I wan’t to buy the orange cube, does anyone have any suggestions on flight controllers that play nice with windows? and how about powering the rail with the pixhawk, it wouldn’t send signal to the esc’s till I went through, and disabled the checks, I got it to start working with 4 of the motors, even though I flashed, and programmed it as a hexi, but when I powered it down, and powered it up again, no signal to the esc’s, tested esc’s, and motors individually again but no startup for the esc’s. Signal runs fine through the receiver on throttle channel, esc’s chime and motor functions, I tested all motors. The multimeter picks up 5.082v across the rail, and I checked the signal wire connections. I’m using a DJI PMU to provide the 5v, the same on the X1000, works great on that rig. Any help would be appreciated, thank you for your time :slight_smile:

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Didn’t read all of that but a CUAV Nora would be a good consideration.

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The Cube orange will be a drop in replacement. After latest firmware install and initial calibrations, you should be able to put back all your non-standard parameters (PIDs and so on).

MissionPlanner on Windows works fine with any of the supported Autopilots.

Start a new topic about the Pixhawk cube on the JMRRC Hexi1650 and someone can help you work through those issues there.
FRAME_TYPE, FRAME_CLASS and SERVOx parameters will be the ones to check.
Enable the pre-flight checks again and then work through the messages to fix anything.

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That is by design. As I have said a thousand times. It is an autopilot, not a power supply.
There is no way to reliably design a power supply into the autopilot that will work in every use case so it is orders of magnitude better to use an external power supply.

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The Cube Black is end of life and has been replace by the Orange. As Shawn said it is a drop in replacement for the Black. And I don’t know what reviews you are reading but the Cubes work great. It is the reference design for everything else out there.

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Thanks I ordered one and it will be here soon, as for Dave’s comment I’m actually using a CUAV PMU to power the Board on the Hexi 1650 ( Its really nice, I de-soldered the ESC connection, and have it connected to the 12s accessory output to read the12s voltage from the PDB, when I get that set up), the DJI PMU for the rail (I have the DJI PMU hooked up to the 6s accessory output), worked for my first build, and everything seems fine function wise. I haven’t heard of the Nora though, I’ll look it up, I think that’s the one that is just like the PX4 with the same connectors. Thanks guys this is one heck of a project. I want to develop a program that uses G code and dxf files to program a hard flight path instead of using GPS

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just got the orange cube, set her up but still cannot get motors to spool. I even copied the settings I had on the set up for the X1000 that works great, but for some reason even with the proper class and 5v output on the rails I can’t get the motors to run, not even a test.

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This won’t do anything for you. Mission Planners Motor Test doesn’t run the motors? What happens when you try it? Did you try increasing the throttle value?

This is a bad idea. Cube Black and Cube Orange are different FC’s.

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There are some specific parameters that you can copy from one system to another but you cannot do a blanket copy of parameters from one flight controller. It will not work. You’ll need to reset your parameters and set up the new controller from scratch.
After you have some experience with the autopilot you will learn which params can be copied.

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So I copied the Prams from the X1000 that works, and uploaded it to the Hexa 1650 and now it works, all motors spinning, other then the prams that didn’t copy by default the only difference was a throttle setting, But I can’t remember what it was. But the motor and esc testing phase is done now I have to go about with GPS, And Telem. Wish me luck, and thanks to all why replied, I’ll probably be back to set up the other prams.

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