I’m wondering what the most cost effective flight controller would be for an ArduRover boat design for experimental boats of about 20cm to 100 cm in length. I’m currently leaning towards the SpeedyBee F405 WING APP Fixed Wing Flight Controller: SpeedyBee F405 WING APP Fixed Wing Flight Controller
I am mostly planning on traditional boat designs with a couple motors and rudders, but I also want to experiment with hovercraft, hydrofoils, and ground effect vehicles. Onboard the vehicles I would like to be able to use claws and water sprayers.
Pros:
Cheap but decent quality.
Plenty of ports for servos and motors and other stuff.
It has 1mb of memory, and the memory size may help future proof it as well.
Cons:
F405 is an older and slower design.
Poor customer support. Is that common in this hobby?
Company seems to have had all sorts of quality issues in the past.
May not include RPM filtering, but is that needed on boats?
Oh, is running Ardupilot on an FC with 1Mb of flash memory a bad idea? Because the H7 boards seem to be rather expensive and experimental boats seem a bit risky for expensive hardware (especially for a beginner).
Not necessarily but it will be feature limited. Ardupilot ate up 1mb of flash quite awhile ago and had to start limiting features from 1mb board firmware. It won’t matter for a Rover but an F4 processor is old and slow and it doesn’t have the flexibility H7’s do for a few things.
What sort of important features are going to be missing with an F4 processor? I looked at the list of missing features on the ardupilot site, but I don’t know the value of each missing feature.
H743 Wlite, is my pick,
They aren’t the cheapest but I don’t have to be concerned with any limitations etc.
they are far cheaper than cube type controllers.
You could go to a really stripped down f4 designed for a mini quad but then you still need power module etc and the matek has 9/12v out, switched if you want plus 5v or 6 or 7.2 for servo load. It will also do camera switching if you have onboard cameras etc
Maybe none for what you want to do but you mentioned Future Proof. Also, the difference in cost between an F4 and the H7’s we are talking about isn’t really significant IMO in the big picture. But to answer your question Lua scripting is one feature that might be missed. Scripting is becoming more and more useful for features that are not in the base firmware. Feature Limitations
No. I have several of these boards since they were 1st released. They have no issues. H743’s are in all of the highest quality and most expensive Flight Controllers.
CUAV X7+ Pro-H743-$1180
There are so many variables with these set-ups, different connected peripherals, different power supplies, hundreds of different parameter values, different firmwares for almost everything, different protocols etc etc.
Its almost a case of if someone has a woking setup, you should be able to copy it for everything except the tuning parameters and you should be pretty close.
I personally have had no issue with 743 losing any data.
Right. I’m sure you can find many people on RCG and YouTube, and some threads on the Discord Channel (a Dog’s breakfast) that have had or do have problems with an H743 based Flight Controller.
User error.
FWIW, I went this route as well and am building a boat with a SpeedyBee F405 WING APP, 40A ESCs and Apisqueen U2 thrusters. I use a FlySky i6S RC + receiver. I flashed ArduPilot on the F405 so the SpeedyBee iOS app won’t work, and I’m on a Mac so not the smoothest path in terms of software. Using QGroundControl though and seems to be able to get everything done so far.
It’s been quite the learning curve but a fun journey! Got the differential thrust set up, MAVlink to my Pi etc. My latest learning though is that my ESCs aren’t bidirectional, so I need to get other ones to match the thruster’s bidi capabilities.